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How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 10

2025-05-31T09:41:00.000-07:00

PUT A" STOP-LOSS" ORDER ON YOUR WORRIES

WOULD you like to know how to make money on the Stock Exchange? Well, so would a million other people-and if I knew the answer, this book would sell for a fabulous price. However, there's one good idea that some successful operators use. This story was told to me by Charles Roberts, an investment counselor with offices at 17 East 42nd Street, New York.

"I originally came up to New York from Texas with twenty thousand dollars which my friends had given me to invest in the stock market," Charles Roberts told me. "I thought," he continued, "that I knew the ropes in the stock market; but I lost every cent. True, I made a lot of profit on some deals; but I ended up by losing everything.

"I did not mind so much losing my own money," Mr. Roberts explained, "but I felt terrible about having lost my friends' money, even though they could well afford it. I dreaded facing them again after our venture had turned out so unfortunately, but, to my astonishment, they not only were good sports about it, but proved to be incurable optimists.

"I knew I had been trading on a hit-or-miss basis and depending largely on luck and other people's opinions. As H. I. Phillips said, I had been 'playing the stock market by ear'.

"I began to think over my mistakes and I determined that before I went back into the market again, I would try to find out what it was all about. So I sought out and became acquainted with one of the most successful speculators who ever lived: Burton S. Castles. I believed I could learn a great deal from him because he had long enjoyed the reputation of being successful year after year and I knew that such a career was not the result of mere chance or luck.

"He asked me a few questions about how I had traded before and then told me what I believe is the most important principle in trading. He said: 'I put a stop-loss order on every market commitment I make. If I buy a stock at, say, fifty dollars a share, I immediately place a stop-loss order on it at forty-five.' That means that when and if the stock should decline as much as five points below its cost, it would be sold automatically, thereby, limiting the loss to five points.

" 'If your commitments are intelligently made in the first place,' the old master continued, 'your profits will average ten, twenty-five, or even fifty points. Consequently, by limiting your losses to five points, you can be wrong more than half of the time and still make plenty of money?'

"I adopted that principle immediately and have used it ever since. It has saved my clients and me many thousands of dollars.

"After a while I realized that the stop-loss principle could be used in other ways besides in the stock market. I began to place a stop-loss order on any and every kind of annoyance and resentment that came to me. It has worked like magic.

"For example, I often have a luncheon date with a friend who is rarely on time. In the old days, he used to keep me stewing around for half my lunch hour before he showed up. Finally, I told him about my stop-loss orders on my worries. I said: 'Bill, my stop-loss order on waiting for you is exactly ten minutes. If you arrive more than ten minutes late, our luncheon engagement will be sold down the river-and I'll be gone.' "

Man alive! How I wish I had had the sense, years ago, to put stop-loss orders on my impatience, on my temper, on my desire for self-justification, on my regrets, and on all

My mental and emotional strains. Why didn't I have the horse sense to size up each situation that threatened to destroy my peace of mind and say to myself: "See here, Dale Carnegie, this situation is worth just so much fussing about and no more"? ... Why didn't I?

However, I must give myself credit for a little sense on one occasion, at least. And it was a serious occasion, too-a crisis in my life-a crisis when I stood watching my dreams and my plans for the future and the work of years vanish into thin air. It happened like this. In my early thirties, I had decided to spend my life writing novels. I was going to be a second Frank Norris or Jack London or Thomas Hardy. I was so in earnest that I spent two years in Europe - where I would live cheaply with dollars during the period of wild, printing-press money that followed the First World War. Furthermore, I spent two years there, writing my magnum opus. Furthermore, I called it The Blizzard.

The title was a natural, for the reception it got among publishers was as cold as any blizzard that ever howled across the plains of the Dakotas. When my literary agent told me it was worthless, that I had no gift, no talent, for fiction, my heart almost stopped. I left his office in a daze. I couldn't have been more stunned if he had hit me across the head with a club. Furthermore, I was stupefied. Furthermore, I realized that I was standing at the crossroads of life, and had to make a tremendous decision. What should I do? Which way should I turn? Weeks passed before I came out of the daze. At that time, I had never heard of the phrase "put a stop-loss order on your worries". But as I look back now, I can see that I did just that. I wrote off my two years of sweating over that novel for just what they were worth - a noble experiment - and went forward from there. I returned to my work of organizing and teaching adult-education classes, and wrote biographies in my spare time - biographies and non-fiction books such as the one you are reading now.

Am I glad now that I made that decision? Glad? Every time I think about it now I feel like dancing in the street for sheer joy! I can honestly say that I have never spent a day or an hour since, lamenting the fact that I am not another Thomas Hardy.

One night a century ago, when a screech owl was screeching in the woods along the shore of Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau dipped his goose quill into his homemade ink and wrote in his diary: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run."

To put it another way: we are fools when we overpay for a thing in terms of what it takes out of our very existence.

Yet that is precisely what Gilbert and Sullivan did. They knew how to create gay words and gay music, but they knew distressingly little about how to create gaiety in their own lives. They created some of the loveliest light operas that ever delighted the world: Patience, Pinafore, The Mikado. But they couldn't control their tempers. They embittered their years over nothing more than the price of a carpet! Sullivan ordered a new carpet for the theater they had bought. When Gilbert saw the bill, he hit the roof. They battled it out in court, and never spoke to one another again as long as they lived. When Sullivan wrote the music for a new production, he mailed it to Gilbert; and when Gilbert wrote the words, he mailed it back to Sullivan. Once they had to take a curtain call together, but they stood on opposite sides of the stage and bowed in different directions, so they wouldn't see one another. They hadn't the sense to put a stop-loss order on their resentments, as Lincoln did.

Once, during the Civil War, when some of Lincoln's friends were denouncing his bitter enemies, Lincoln said: "You have more of a feeling of personal resentment than I have. Perhaps I have too little of it; but I never thought it paid. A man doesn't have the time to

Spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him."

I wish an old aunt of mine-Aunt Edith-had had Lincoln's forgiving spirit. She and Uncle Frank lived on a mortgaged farm that was infested with cockleburs and cursed with poor soil and ditches. They had tough going-had to squeeze every nickel. But Aunt Edith loved to buy a few curtains and other items to brighten up their bare home. She bought these small luxuries on credit at Dan Ever sole's dry goods store in Maryville, Missouri. Uncle Frank worried about their debts. He had a farmer's horror of running up bills, so he secretly told Dan Ever sole to stop letting his wife buy on credit. When she heard that, she hit the roof-and she was still hitting the roof about it almost fifty years after it had happened. I have heard her tell the story-not once, but many times. The last time I ever saw her, she was in her late seventies. I said to her; "Aunt Edith, Uncle Frank did wrong to humiliate you; but don't you honestly feel that your complaining about it almost half a century after it happened is infinitely worse than what he did?" (I might as well have said it to the moon.)

Aunt Edith paid dearly for the grudge and bitter memories that she nourished. She paid for them with her own peace of mind.

When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old, he made a mistake that he remembered for seventy years. When he was a lad of seven, he fell in love with a whistle. He was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and demanded the whistle without even asking its price. "I then came home," he wrote to a friend seventy years later, "and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle." But when his older brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse laugh; and, as he said: "I cried with vexation."

Years later, when Franklin was a world-famous figure, and Ambassador to France, he still remembered that the fact that he had paid too much for his whistle had caused him "more chagrin than the whistle gave him pleasure."

But the lesson it taught Franklin was cheap in the end. "As I grew up," he said, "and came into the world and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle. In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.

Gilbert and Sullivan paid too much for their whistle. So did Aunt Edith. So did Dale Carnegie-on many occasions. And so did the immortal Leo Tolstoy, author of two of the world's greatest novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. According to The Encyclopedia Britannica, Leo Tolstoy was, during the last twenty years of his life, "probably the most venerated man in the whole world." For twenty years before he died-from 1890 to 1910-an unending stream of admirers made pilgrimages to his home in order to catch a glimpse of his face, to hear the sound of his voice, or even touch the hem of his garment. Every sentence he uttered was taken down in a notebook, almost as if it were a "divine revelation". But when it came to living-to ordinary living-well, Tolstoy had even less sense at seventy than Franklin had at seven! He had no sense at all.

Here's what 1 mean. Tolstoy married a girl he loved very dearly. In fact, they were so happy together that they used to get on their knees and pray to God to let them continue their lives in such sheer, heavenly ecstasy. But the girl Tolstoy married was jealous by nature. She used to dress herself up as a peasant and spy on his movements, even out

In the woods. They had fearful rows. She became so jealous, even of her own children, that she grabbed a gun and shot a hole in her daughter's photograph. She even rolled on the floor with an opium bottle held to her lips, and threatened to commit suicide, while the children huddled in a corner of the room and screamed with terror.

And what did Tolstoy do? Well, I don't blame the man for up and smashing the furniture-he had good provocation. But he did far worse than that. He kept a private diary! Yes, a diary, in which he placed all the blame on his wife! That was his "whistle"! He was determined to make sure that coming generations would exonerate him and put the blame on his wife. And what did his wife do, in answer to this? Why, she tore pages out of his diary and burned them, of course. She started a diary of her own, in which she made him the villain. She even wrote a novel, entitled Whose Fault? In which she depicted her husband as a household fiend and herself as a martyr.

All to what end? Why did these two people turn the only home they had into what Tolstoy himself called "a lunatic asylum"? Obviously, there were several reasons. One of those reasons was their burning desire to impress you and me. Yes, we are the posterity whose opinion they were worried about! Do we give a hoot in Hades about which one was to blame? No, we are too concerned with our own problems to waste a minute thinking about the Tolstoy's. What a price these two wretched people paid for their whistle! Fifty years of living in a veritable hell-just because neither of them had the sense to say: "Stop!" Because neither of them had enough judgment of values to say: "Let's put a stop-loss order on this thing instantly. We are squandering our lives. Let's say 'Enough' now!"

Yes, I honestly believe that this is one of the greatest secrets to true peace of mind-a decent sense of values. And I believe we could annihilate fifty percent of all our worries at once if we would develop a sort of private gold standard-a gold standard of what things are worth to us in terms of our lives.

So, to break the worry habit before it breaks you, here is Rule 5:

Whenever we are tempted to throw good money after bad in terms of human living, let's stop and ask ourselves these three Questions:

1. How much does this thing I am worrying about really matter to me?

2. At what point shall I set a "stop-loss" order on this worry -and forget it?

3. Exactly how much shall I pay for this whistle? Have I already paid more than it is worth?

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 9

2025-05-31T09:40:00.000-07:00

CO-OPERATE WITH THE INEVITABLE

When I was a little boy, I was playing with some of my friends in the attic of an old, abandoned log house in north-west Missouri. As I climbed down out of the attic, I rested my feet on a window-sill for a moment-and then jumped. I had a ring on my left forefinger; and as I jumped, the ring caught on a nail head and tore off my finger.

I screamed. I was terrified. Furthermore, I was positive I was going to die. But after the hand healed, I never worried about it for one split second. What would have been the use? ... I accepted the inevitable.

Now I often go for a month at a time without even thinking about the fact that I have only three fingers and a thumb on my left hand.

A few years ago, I met a man who was running a freight elevator in one of the downtown office buildings in New York. I noticed that his left hand had been cut off at the wrist. I asked him if the loss of that hand bothered him. He said: "Oh, no, I hardly ever think about it. I am not married; and the only time I ever think about it is when I try to thread a needle."

It is astonishing how quickly we can accept almost any situation-if we have to-and adjust ourselves to it and forget about it.

I often think of an inscription on the ruins of a fifteenth-century cathedral in Amsterdam, Holland. This inscription says in Flemish: "It is so. It cannot be otherwise."

As you and I march across the decades of time, we are going to meet a lot of unpleasant situations that are so. They cannot be otherwise. We have our choice. We can either accept them as inevitable and adjust ourselves to them, or we can ruin our lives with rebellion and maybe end up with a nervous breakdown.

Here is a bit of sage advice from one of my favorite philosophers, William James. "Be willing to have it so," he said. "Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune." Elizabeth Conley, of 2840 NE 49th Avenue, Portland, Oregon, had to find that out the hard way. Here is a letter that she wrote me recently: "On the very day that America was celebrating the victory of our armed forces in North Africa," the letter says, "I received a telegram from the War Department: my nephew-the person I loved most-was missing in action. A short time later, another telegram arrived saying he was dead.

"I was prostrate with grief. Up to that time, I had felt that life had been very good to me. I had a job I loved. I had helped to raise this nephew. He represented to me all that was fine and good in young manhood. I had felt that all the bread I had cast upon the waters was coming back to me as cake! ... Then came this telegram. My whole world collapsed. I felt there was nothing left to live for. I neglected my work; neglected my friends. Furthermore, I let everything go. Furthermore, I was bitter and resentful. Why did my loving nephew have to be taken? Why did this good boy-with life all before him-why did he have to be killed? I couldn't accept it. My grief was so overwhelming that I decided to give up my work, and go away and hide myself in my tears and bitterness.

"I was clearing out my desk, getting ready to quit, when I came across a letter that I had forgotten-a letter from this nephew who had been killed, a letter he had written to me when my mother had died a few years ago. 'Of course, we will miss her,' the letter said, 'and especially you. But I know you'll carry on. Your own personal philosophy will make you do that. I shall never forget the beautiful truths you taught me. Wherever I am, or how far apart we may be, I shall always remember that you taught me to smile, and to take whatever comes, like a man.'

"I read and reread that letter. It seemed as if he were there beside me, speaking to me. He seemed to be saying to me: 'Why don't you do what you taught me to do? Carry on, no matter what happens. Hide your private sorrows under a smile and carry on.'

"So, I went back to my work. I stopped being bitter and rebellious. I kept saying to myself: 'It is done. Furthermore, I can't change it. But I can and will carry on as he wished me to do.' I threw all my mind and strength into my work. I wrote letters to soldiers-to other people's boys. Furthermore, I joined an adult-education class at night-seeking out new interests and making new friends. Furthermore, I can hardly believe the change that has come over me. Furthermore, I have ceased mourning over the past that is forever gone. Furthermore, I am living each day now with joy-just as my nephew would have wanted me to do. Furthermore, I have made peace with life. Furthermore, I have accepted my fate. Furthermore, I am now living a fuller and more complete life than I had ever known."

Elizabeth Conley, out in Portland, Oregon, learned what all of us will have to learn sooner or later: namely, that we must accept and co-operate with the inevitable. "It is so. It cannot be otherwise." That is not an easy lesson to learn. Even kings on their thrones have to keep reminding themselves of it. The late George V had these framed words hanging on the wall of his library in Buckingham Palace: "Teach me neither to cry for the moon nor over spilled milk." The same thought is expressed by Schopenhauer in this way: "A good supply of resignation is of the first importance in providing for the journey of life."

Obviously, circumstances alone do not make us happy or unhappy. It is the way we react to circumstances that determines our feelings. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. That is where the kingdom of hell is, too.

We can all endure disaster and tragedy and triumph over them-if we have to. We may not think we can, but we have surprisingly strong inner resources that will see us through if we will only make use of them. Furthermore, we are stronger than we think.

The late Booth Tarkington always said: "I could take anything that life could force upon me except one thing: blindness. I could never endure that."

Then one day, when he was along in his sixties, Tarkington glanced down at the carpet on the floor. The colors were blurred. He couldn't see the pattern. He went to a specialist. Furthermore, he learned the tragic truth: he was losing his sight. One eye was nearly blind; the other would follow. That which he feared most had come upon him.

And how did Tarkington react to this "worst of all disasters"? Did he feel: "This is it! This is the end of my life"? No, to his amazement, he felt quite gay. He even called upon his humor. Floating "specks" annoyed him; they would swim across his eyes and cut off his vision. Yet when the largest of these specks would swim across his sight, he would say: "Hello! There's Grandfather again! Wonder where he's going on this fine morning!"

How could fate ever conquer a spirit like that? The answer is it couldn't. When total blindness closed in, Tarkington said: "I found I could take the loss of my eyesight, just as a man can take anything else. If I lost all five of my senses, I know I could live on inside my mind. For it is in the mind we see, and in the mind we live, whether we know it or not."

In the hope of restoring his eyesight, Tarkington had to go through more than twelve operations within one year. With local anesthetic! Did he rail against this? He knew it had to be done. He knew he couldn't escape it, so the only way to lessen his suffering was to take it with grace. Furthermore, he refused a private room at the hospital and went into a ward, where he could be with other people who had troubles, too. Furthermore, he tried to cheer them up. And when he had to submit to repeated operations-fully conscious of what was being done to his eyes-he tried to remember how fortunate he was. "How wonderful!" he said. "How wonderful, that science now has the skill to operate on anything so delicate as the human eye!"

The average man would have been a nervous wreck if he had had to endure more than twelve operations and blindness. Yet Tarkington said: "I would not exchange this experience for a happier one." It taught him acceptance. It taught him that nothing life could bring him was beyond his strength to endure. Furthermore, it taught him, as John Milton discovered, that "It is not miserable to be blind, it is only miserable not to be able to endure blindness."

Margaret Fuller, the famous New England feminist, once offered as her credo: "I accept the Universe!"

When grouchy old Thomas Carlyle heard that in England, he snorted: "By gad, she'd better!" Yes, and by gad, you and I had better accept the inevitable, too!

If we rail and kick against it and grow bitter, we won't change the inevitable; but we will change ourselves. I know. I have tried it.

I once refused to accept an inevitable situation with which I was confronted. I played the fool and railed against it, and rebelled. Furthermore, I turned my nights into tells of insomnia. Furthermore, I brought upon myself everything I didn't want. Finally, after a year of self-torture, I had to accept what I knew from the outset I couldn't possibly alter.

I should have cried out years ago with old Walt Whitman:

Oh, to confront night, storms, hunger,

Ridicule, accident, rebuffs as the trees

And animals do.

I spent twelve years working with cattle; yet I never saw a Jersey cow running a temperature because the pasture was burning up from a lack of rain or because of sleet and cold or because her boyfriend was paying too much attention to another heifer. The animals confront night, storms, and hunger calmly; so they never have nervous breakdowns or stomach ulcers; and they never go insane.

Am I advocating that we simply bow down to all the adversities that come our way? Not by a long shot! That is mere fatalism. As long as there is a chance that we can save a situation, let's fight! But when common sense tells us that we are up against something that is so-and cannot be otherwise-then, in the name of our sanity, let's not look before and after and pine for what is not.

The late Dean Hawks of Columbia University told me that he had taken a Mother Goose rhyme as one of his mottoes:

For every ailment under the sun.

There is a remedy, or there is none;

If there be one, try to find it;

If there be none, never mind it.

While writing this book, I interviewed a number of the leading businessmen of America; and I was impressed by the fact that they co-operated with the inevitable and led lives singularly free from worry. If they hadn't done that, they would have cracked under the strain. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

J.C. Penney, founder of the nation-wide chain of Penney stores, said to me: "I wouldn't worry if I lost every cent I have because I don't see what is to be gained by worrying. I do the best job I possibly can; and leave the results in the laps of the gods."

Henry Ford told me much the same thing. "When I can't handle events," he said, "I let them handle themselves."

When I asked K.T. Keller, president of the Chrysler Corporation, how he kept from worrying, he said: "When I am up against a tough situation, if I can do anything about it, I do it. If I can't, I just forget it. I never worry about the future, because I know no man living can possibly figure out what is going to happen in the future. There are so many forces that will affect that future! Nobody can tell what prompts those forces-or understand them. So why worry about them?" K. T. Keller would be embarrassed if you told him he is a philosopher. He is just a good businessman, yet he has stumbled on the same philosophy that Epictetus taught in Rome nineteen centuries ago. "There is only one way to happiness," Epictetus taught the Romans, "and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."

Sarah Bernhardt, the "divine Sarah" was an illustrious example of a woman who knew how to co-operate with the inevitable. For half a century, she had been the reigning queen of the theater on four continents-the best-loved actress on earth. Then, when she was seventy-one and broke-she had lost all her money-her physician, Professor Ponzi of Paris, told her he would have to amputate her leg. While crossing the Atlantic, she had fallen on deck during a storm, and injured her leg severely. Phlebitis developed. Her leg shrank. The pain became so intense that the doctor felt her leg had to be amputated. He was almost afraid to tell the stormy, tempestuous "divine Sarah" what had to be done. He fully expected that the terrible news would set off an explosion of hysteria. But he was wrong. Sarah looked at him a moment, and then said quietly: "If it has to be, it has to be." It was fate.

As she was being wheeled away to the operating room, her son stood weeping. She waved to him with a gay gesture and said cheerfully: "Don't go away. I'll be right back."

On the way to the operating room she recited a scene from one of her plays. Someone asked her if she were doing this to cheer herself up. She said: "No, to cheer up the doctors and nurses. It will be a strain on them."

After recovering from the operation, Sarah Bernhardt went on touring the world and enchanting audiences for another seven years.

"When we stop fighting the inevitable," said Elsie McCormick in a Reader's Digest article, "we release energy which enables us to create a richer life."

No one living has enough emotion and vigor to fight the inevitable and, at the same time, enough left over to create a new life. Choose one or the other. You can either bend with the inevitable sleet-storms of life-or you can resist them and break!

I saw that happen on a farm I own in Missouri. I planted a score of trees on that farm. At first, they grew with astonishing rapidity. Then a sleet-storm encrusted each twig and branch with a heavy coating of ice. Instead of bowing gracefully to their burden, these trees proudly resisted and broke and split under the load-and had to be destroyed. They hadn't learned the wisdom of the forests of the north. I have travelled hundreds of miles through the evergreen forests of Canada, yet I have never seen a spruce or a pine broken by sleet or ice. These evergreen forests know how to bend, how to bow down their branches, how to co-operate with the inevitable.

The masters of jujitsu teach their pupils to "bend like the willow; don't resist like the oak."

Why do you think your automobile tires stand up on the road and take so much punishment? At first, the manufacturers tried to make a tire that would resist the shocks of the road. It was soon cut to ribbons. Then they made a tire that would absorb the shocks of the road. That tire could "take it". You and I will last longer, and enjoy smoother riding, if we learn to absorb the shocks and jolts along the rocky road of life.

What will happen to you and me if we resist the shocks of life instead of absorbing them? What will happen if we refuse to "bend like the willow" and insist on resisting like the oak? The answer is easy. We will set up a series of inner conflicts. We will be worried, tense, strained, and neurotic.

If we go still further and reject the harsh world of reality and retreat into a dream world of our own making, we will then be insane.

During the war, millions of frightened soldiers had either to accept the inevitable or break under the strain. To illustrate, let's take the case of William H. Cassius, 7126 76th Street, Glendale, New York. Here is a prize-winning talk he gave before one of my adult-education classes in New York:

"Shortly after I joined the Coast Guard, I was assigned to one of the hottest spots on this side of the Atlantic. I was made a supervisor of explosives. Imagine it. Me! A biscuit salesman becoming a supervisor of explosives! The very thought of finding yourself standing on top of thousands of tons of T.N.T. is enough to chill the marrow in a cracker salesman's bones. I was given only two days of instruction; and what I learned filled me with even more terror. I'll never forget my first assignment. On a dark, cold, foggy day, I was given my orders on the open pier of Cave Point, Bayonne, New Jersey.

"I was assigned to Hold No. 5 on my ship. I had to work down in that hold with five longshoremen. They had strong backs, but they knew nothing whatever about explosives. And they were loading blockbusters, each one of which contained a ton of

T.N.T.-enough explosive to blow that old ship to kingdom come. These blockbusters were being lowered by two cables. I kept saying to myself: Suppose one of those cables slipped-or broke! Oh, boy! Was I scared! I trembled. My mouth was dry. My knees sagged. My heart pounded. But I couldn't run away. That would be desertion. I would be disgraced-my parents would be disgraced-and I might be shot for desertion. I couldn't run. Furthermore, I had to stay. Furthermore, I kept looking at the careless way those longshoremen were handling those blockbusters. The ship might blow up any minute. After an hour or more of this spine-chilling terror, I began to use a little common sense. I gave myself a good talking to. I said: 'Look here! So you are blown up. So what! You will never know the difference! It will be an easy way to die. Much better than dying by cancer. Don't be a fool. You can't expect to live forever! You've got to do this job-or be shot. So you might as well like it."

"I talked to myself like that for hours; and I began to feel at ease. Finally, I overcame my worry and fears by forcing myself to accept an inevitable situation.

"I'll never forget that lesson. Every time I am tempted now to worry about something I can't possibly change, I shrug my shoulders and say: 'Forget it.' I find that it works-even for a biscuit salesman." Hooray! Let's give three cheers and one cheer more for the biscuit salesman of the Pinafore.

Outside the crucifixion of Jesus, the most famous death scene in all history was the death of Socrates. Ten thousand centuries from now, men will still be reading and cherishing Plato's immortal description of it-one of the most moving and beautiful passages in all literature. Certain men of Athens-jealous and envious of old barefooted Socrates-trumped up charges against him and had him tried and condemned to death. When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: "Try to bear lightly what needs must be." Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.

"Try to bear lightly what needs must be." Those words were spoken 399 years before Christ was born; but this worrying old world needs those words today more than ever before: "Try to bear lightly what needs must be."

During the past eight years, I have been reading practically every book and magazine article I could find that dealt even remotely with banishing worry. ... Would you like to know what is the best single bit of advice about worry that I have ever discovered in all that reading? Well, here it is-summed up in twenty-seven words-words that you and I ought to paste on our bathroom mirrors, so that each time we wash our faces we could also wash away all worry from our minds. This priceless prayer was written by Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, Professor of Applied Christianity, Union Theological Seminary, Broadway and 120th Street, New York.

God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; The courage to change the things I can; And the wisdom to know the difference.

To break the worry habit before it breaks you, Rule 4 is:

Co-operate with the inevitable.

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 8

2025-05-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

A LAW THAT WILL OUTLAW MANY OF OUR WORRIES

As a child, I grew up on a Missouri farm; and one day, while helping my mother pit cherries, I began to cry. My mother said: "Dale, what in the world are you crying about?" I blubbered: "I'm afraid I am going to be buried alive!"

I was full of worries in those days. When thunderstorms came, I worried about fear I would be killed by lightning. When hard times came, I worried about fear we wouldn't have enough to eat. I worried about fear I would go to hell when I died. I was terrified for fear an

Older boy, Sam White, would cut off my big ears-as he threatened to do. I worried about fear girls would laugh at me if I tipped my hat to them. I worried about fear no girl would ever be willing to marry me. Furthermore, I worried about what I would say to my wife immediately after we were married. Furthermore, I imagined that we would be married in some country church, and then get in a surrey with fringe on the top and ride back to the farm ... but how would I be able to keep the conversation going on that ride back to the farm? How? How? I pondered over that earth-shaking problem for many an hour as I walked behind the plow.

As the years went by, I gradually discovered that ninety-nine percent of the things I worried about never happened.

For example, as I have already said, I was once terrified of lightning; but I now know that the chances of my being killed by lightning in any one year are, according to the National Safety Council, only one in three hundred and fifty thousand.

My fear of being buried alive was even more absurd: I don't imagine that one person in ten million is buried alive; yet I once cried for fear of it.

One person out of every eight dies of cancer. If I had wanted something to worry about, I should have worried about cancer -instead of being killed by lightning or being buried alive.

To be sure, I have been talking about the worries of youth and adolescence. But many of our adult worries are almost as absurd. You and I could probably eliminate nine-tenths of our worries right now if we would cease our fretting long enough to discover whether, by the law of averages, there was any real justification for our worries.

The most famous insurance company on earth-Lloyd's of London-has made countless millions out of the tendency of everybody to worry about things that rarely happen. Lloyd's of London bets people that the disasters they are worrying about will never occur. However, they don't call it betting. They call it insurance. But it is really betting based on the law of averages. This great insurance firm has been going strong for two hundred years; and unless human nature changes, it will still be going strong fifty centuries from now by insuring shoes and ships and sealing-wax against disasters that, by the law of average, don't happen nearly so often as people imagine.

If we examine the law of averages, we will often be astounded at the facts we uncover. For example, if I knew that during the next five years I would have to fight in a battle as bloody as the Battle of Gettysburg, I would be terrified. I would take out all the life insurance I could get. I would draw up my will and set all my earthly affairs in order. Furthermore, I would say: "I'll probably never live through that battle, so I had better make the most of the few years I have left." Yet the facts are that, according to the law of averages, it is just as dangerous, just as fatal, to try to live from age fifty to age fifty-five in peace-time as it was to fight in the Battle of Gettysburg. What I am trying to say is this: in times of peace, just as many people die per thousand between the ages of fifty and fifty-five as were killed per thousand among the 163,000 soldiers who fought at Gettysburg.

I wrote several chapters of this book at James Simpson's Sum-Ti-Gah Lodge, on the shore of Bow Lake in the Canadian Rockies. While stopping there one summer, I met Mr. and Mrs. Herbert H. Salinger, of 2298 Pacific Avenue, San Francisco. Mrs. Salinger, a poised, serene woman, gave me the impression that she had never worried. One evening in front of the roaring fireplace, I asked her if she had ever been troubled by worry. "Troubled by it?" she said. "My life was almost ruined by it. Before I learned to conquer worry, I lived through eleven years of self-made hell. I was irritable and hot-

Tempered. I lived under terrific tension. I would take the bus every week from my home in San Mateo to shop in San Francisco. But even while shopping, I worried myself into a dither: maybe I had left the electric iron connected on the ironing board. Maybe the house had caught fire. Maybe the maid had run off and left the children. Maybe they had been out on their bicycles and been killed by a car. In the midst of my shopping, I would often worry myself into a cold perspiration and rush out and take the bus home to see if everything was all right. No wonder my first marriage ended in disaster.

"My second husband is a lawyer-a quiet, analytical man who never worries about anything. When I became tense and anxious, he would say to me: 'Relax. Let's think this out. ... What are you really worrying about? Let's examine the law of averages and see whether it is likely to happen.'

"For example, I remember the time we were driving from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the Carlsbad Caverns-driving on a dirt road-when we were caught in a terrible rainstorm.

"The car was slithering and sliding. We couldn't control it. I was positive we would slide off into one of the ditches that flanked the road; but my husband kept repeating to me: 'I am driving very slowly. Nothing serious is likely to happen. Even if the car does slide into the ditch, by the law of averages, we won't be hurt.' His calmness and confidence quieted me.

"One summer we were on a camping trip in the Joaquin Valley of the Canadian Rockies. One night we were camping seven thousand feet above sea level, when a storm threatened to tear our tents to shreds. The tents were tied with guy ropes to a wooden platform. The outer tent shook and trembled and screamed and shrieked in the wind. I expected every minute to see our tent torn loose and hurled through the sky. I was terrified! But my husband kept saying: 'Look, my dear, we are travelling with Brewster's guides. Brewster's know what they are doing. They have been pitching tents in these mountains for sixty years. This tent has been here for many seasons. It hasn't blown down yet and, by the law of averages, it won't blow away tonight; and even if it does, we can take shelter in another tent. So relax. ... I did; and I slept soundly the balance of the night.

"A few years ago an infantile-paralysis epidemic swept over our part of California. In the old days, I would have been hysterical. But my husband persuaded me to act calmly. We took all the precautions we could; we kept our children away from crowds, away from school and the movies. By consulting the Board of Health, we found out that even during the worst infantile-paralysis epidemic that California had ever known up to that time, only 1,835 children had been stricken in the entire state of California. And that the usual number was around two hundred or three hundred. Tragic as those figures are, we nevertheless felt that, according to the law of averages, the chances of any one child being stricken were remote.

" 'By the law of averages, it won't happen.' That phrase has destroyed ninety percent of my worries; and it has made the past twenty years of my life beautiful and peaceful beyond my highest expectations."

General George Crook-probably the greatest Indian fighter in American history-says in his Autobiography that "nearly all the worries and unhappiness" of the Indians "came from their imagination, and not from reality."

As I look back across the decades, I can see that that is where most of my worries came from also. Jim Grant told me that that had been his experience, too. He owns the James A. Grant Distributing Company, 204 Franklin Street, New York City. He orders from ten

To fifteen car-loads of Florida oranges and grapefruit at a time. He told me that he used to torture himself with such thoughts as: What if there's a train wreck? What if my fruit is strewn all over the countryside? What if a bridge collapses as my cars are going across it? Of course, the fruit was insured; but he feared that if he didn't deliver his fruit on time, he might risk the loss of his market. He worried so much that he feared he had stomach ulcers and went to a doctor. The doctor told him there was nothing wrong with him except jumpy nerves. "I saw the light then," he said, "and began to ask myself questions. I said to myself: 'Look here, Jim Grant, how many fruit cars have you handled over the years?' The answer was: 'About twenty-five thousand.' Then I asked myself: 'How many of those cars were ever wrecked?' The answer was: 'Oh-maybe five.' Then I said to myself: 'Only five-out of twenty-five thousand? Do you know what that means? A ratio of five thousand to one! In other words, by the law of averages, based on experience, the chances are five thousand to one against one of your cars ever being wrecked. So what are you worried about?'

"Then I said to myself: 'Well, a bridge may collapse!' Then I asked myself: 'How many cars have you actually lost from a bridge collapsing?' The answer was-'None.' Then I said to myself: 'Aren't you a fool to be worrying yourself into stomach ulcers over a bridge which has never yet collapsed, and over a railroad wreck when the chances are five thousand to one against it!'

"When I looked at it that way," Jim Grant told me, "I felt pretty silly. I decided then and there to let the law of averages do the worrying for me-and I have not been troubled with my 'stomach ulcer' since!"

When Al Smith was Governor of New York, I heard him answer the attacks of his political enemies by saying over and over: "Let's examine the record ... let's examine the record." Then he proceeded to give the facts. The next time you and I are worrying about what may happen, let's take a tip from wise old Al Smith: let's examine the record and see what basis there is, if any, for our gnawing anxieties. That is precisely what Frederick J. Masted did when he feared he was lying in his grave. Here is his story as he told it to one of our adult-education classes in New York:

"Early in June 1944, I was lying in a slit trench near Omaha Beach. I was with the 999th Signal Service Company, and we had just 'dug in' in Normandy. As I looked around at that slit trench-just a rectangular hole in the ground-I said to myself: 'This looks just like a grave.' When I lay down and tried to sleep in it, it felt like a grave. I couldn't help saying to myself: 'Maybe this is my grave.' When the German bombers began coming over at 11 p.m., and the bombs started falling, I was scared stiff. For the first two or three nights I couldn't sleep at all. By the fourth or fifth night, I was almost a nervous wreck. I knew that if I didn't do something, I would go stark crazy. So I reminded myself that five nights had passed, and I was still alive; and so was every man in our outfit. Only two had been injured, and they had been hurt, not by German bombs, but by falling flak, from our own anti-aircraft guns. I decided to stop worrying by doing something constructive. So I built a thick wooden roof over my slit trench, to protect myself from flak. I thought of the vast area over which my unit was spread. I told myself that the only way I could be killed in that deep, narrow slit trench was by a direct hit; and I figured out that the chance of a direct hit on me was not one in ten thousand. After a couple of nights of looking at it in this way, I calmed down and slept even through the bomb raids!"

The United States Navy used the statistics of the law of averages to buck up the morale of their men. One ex-sailor told me that when he and his shipmates were assigned to high-octane tankers, they were worried stiff. They all believed that if a tanker loaded with high-octane gasoline was hit by a torpedo, it exploded and blew everybody to kingdom come.

But the U.S. Navy knew otherwise; so the Navy issued exact figures, showing that out of one hundred tankers hit by torpedoes sixty stayed afloat; and of the forty that did sink, only five sank in less than ten minutes. That meant time to get off the ship-it also meant casualties were tiny. Did this help morale? "This knowledge of the law of averages wiped out my jitters," said Clyde W. Mass, of 1969 Walnut Street, St. Paul, Minnesota-the man who told this story. "The whole crew felt better. We knew we had a chance; and that, by the law of averages, we probably wouldn't be killed." To break the worry habit before it breaks you-here is Rule 3:

"Let's examine the record." Let's ask ourselves: "What are the chances, according to the law of averages, that this event I am worrying about will ever occur?"

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 7

2025-05-31T09:37:00.000-07:00

DON'T LET THE BEETLES GET YOU DOWN

Here is a dramatic story that I'll probably remember as long as I live. It was told to me by Robert Moore, of 14 Highland Avenue, Maple wood, New Jersey.

"I learned the biggest lesson of my life in March 1945," he said, "I learned it under 276 feet of water off the coast of Indochina. I was one of eighty-eight men aboard the submarine Baya S.S. 318. We had discovered by radar that a small Japanese convoy was coming our way. As daybreak approached, we submerged to attack. I saw through the periscope a Jap destroyer escort, a tanker, and a minelayer. We fired three torpedoes at the destroyer escort, but missed. Something went haywire in the mechanics of each torpedo. The destroyer, not knowing that she had been attacked, continued on. We were getting ready to attack the last ship, the minelayer, when suddenly she turned and came directly at us. (A Jap plane had spotted us under sixty feet of water and had radioed our position to the Jap minelayer.) We went down to 150 feet, to avoid detection, and rigged for a depth charge. We put extra bolts on the hatches; and, in order to make our sub absolutely silent, we turned off the fans, the cooling system, and all electrical gear.

"Three minutes later, all hell broke loose. Six depth charges exploded all around us and pushed us down to the ocean floor -a depth of 276 feet. We were terrified. To be attacked in less than a thousand feet of water is dangerous-less than five hundred feet is almost always fatal. And we were being attacked in a trifle more than half of five hundred feet of water -just about knee-deep, as far as safety was concerned. For fifteen hours, that Jap minelayer kept dropping depth charges.

If a depth charge explodes within seventeen feet of a sub, the concussion will blow a hole in it. Scores of these depth charges exploded within fifty feet of us. We were ordered 'to secure'- to lie quietly in our bunks and remain calm. I was so terrified I could hardly breathe. 'This is death,' I kept saying to myself over and over. 'This is death! ... This is death!' With the fans and cooling system turned off, the air inside the sub was over a hundred degrees; but I was so chilled with fear that I put on a sweater and a fur-lined jacket; and still I trembled with cold. My teeth chattered. I broke out in a cold, clammy sweat. The attack continued for fifteen hours. Then ceased suddenly. Apparently the Jap minelayer had exhausted its supply of depth charges, and steamed away. Those fifteen hours of attack seemed like fifteen million years. All my life passed before me in review.

I remembered all the bad things I had done, all the little absurd things I had worried about. I had been a bank clerk before I joined the Navy. Furthermore, I had worried about the long hours, the poor pay, the poor prospects of advancement. Furthermore, I had worried because I couldn't own my own home, couldn't buy a new car, couldn't buy my wife nice clothes. How I had hated my old boss, who was always nagging and scolding! I remembered how I would come home at night sore and grouchy and quarrel with my wife over trifles. I had worried about a scar on my forehead-a nasty cut from an auto accident.

"How big all these worries seemed years ago! But how absurd they seemed when depth charges were threatening to blow me to kingdom come. I promised myself then and there that if I ever saw the sun and the stars again, I would never, never worry again. Never! Never! I Never!!! I learned more about the art of living in those fifteen terrible

Hours in that submarine than I had learned by studying books for four years in Syracuse University."

We often face the major disasters of life bravely-and then let the trifles, the "pains in the neck", get us down. For example, Samuel Pepys tells in his Diary about seeing Sir Harry Vane's head chopped off in London. As Sir Harry mounted the platform, he was not pleading for his life, but was pleading with the executioner not to hit the painful boil on his neck!

That was another thing that Admiral Byrd discovered down in the terrible cold and darkness of the polar nights-that his men fussed more about the' 'pains in the neck" than about the big things. They bore, without complaining, the dangers, the hardships, and the cold that was often eighty degrees below zero. "But," says Admiral Byrd, "I know of bunkmates who quit speaking because each suspected the other of inching his gear into the other's allotted space; and I knew of one who could not eat unless he could find a place in the mess hall out of sight of the Fletcher who solemnly chewed his food twenty-eight times before swallowing.

"In a polar camp," says Admiral Byrd, "little things like that have the power to drive even disciplined men to the edge of insanity."

And you might have added, Admiral Byrd, that "little things" in marriage drive people to the edge of insanity and cause "half the heartaches in the world."

At least, that is what the authorities say. For example, Judge Joseph Sabbath of Chicago, after acting as arbiter in more than forty thousand unhappy marriages, declared: "Trivialities are at the bottom of most marital unhappiness"; and Frank S. Hogan, District Attorney of New York County, says: "Fully half the cases in our criminal courts originate in little things. Bar-room bravado, domestic wrangling, an insulting remark, a disparaging word, a rude action-those are the little things that lead to assault and murder. Very few of us are cruelly and greatly wronged. It is the small blows to our self-esteem, the indignities, the little jolts to our vanity, which cause half the heartaches in the world."

When Eleanor Roosevelt was first married, she "worried for days" because her new cook had served a poor meal. "But if that happened now," Mrs. Roosevelt says, "I would shrug my shoulders and forget it." Good. That is acting like an adult emotionally. Even Catherine the Great, an absolute autocrat, used to laugh the thing off when the cook spoiled a meal.

Mrs. Carnegie and I had dinner at a friend's house in Chicago. While carving the meat, he did something wrong. I didn't notice it; and I wouldn't have cared even if I had noticed it But his wife saw it and jumped down his throat right in front of us. "John," she cried, "watch what you are doing! Can't you ever learn to serve properly!"

Then she said to us: "He is always making mistakes. He just doesn't try." Maybe he didn't try to carve; but I certainly give him credit for trying to live with her for twenty years. Frankly, I would rather have eaten a couple of hot dogs with mustard-in an atmosphere of peace-than to have dined on Peking duck and shark fins while listening to her scolding.

Shortly after that experience, Mrs. Carnegie and I had some friends at our home for dinner. Just before they arrived, Mrs. Carnegie found that three of the napkins didn't match the tablecloth.

"I rushed to the cook," she told me later, "and found that the other three napkins had gone to the laundry. The guests were at the door. There was no time to change. I felt like bursting into tears! All I could think was: 'Why did this stupid mistake have to spoil my whole evening?' Then I thought-well-why let it? I went into dinner, determined to have a good time. And I did. I would much rather our friends think I was a sloppy housekeeper," she told me, "than a nervous, bad-tempered one. And anyhow, as far as I could make out, no one noticed the napkins!"

A well-known legal maxim says: De minimis non curate led- "the law does not concern itself with trifles." And neither should the worrier-if he wants peace of mind.

Much of the time, all we need to overcome the annoyance of trifles is to affect a shifting of emphasis-set up a new, and pleasurable, point of view in the mind. My friend Homer Crop, who wrote They Had to See Paris and a dozen other books, gives a wonderful example of how this can be done. He used to be driven half crazy, while working on a book, by the rattling of the radiators in his New York apartment. The steam would bang and sizzle-and he would sizzle with irritation as he sat at his desk.

"Then," says Homer Crop, "I went with some friends on a camping expedition. While listening to the limbs crackling in the roaring fire, I thought how much they sounded like the crackling of the radiators. Why should I like one and hate the other? When I went home I said to myself: 'The crackling of the limbs in the fire was a pleasant sound; the sound of the radiators is about the same-I'll go to sleep and not worry about the noise.' And I did. For a few days I was conscious of the radiators; but soon I forgot all about them.

"And so it is with many petty worries. We dislike them and get into a stew, all because we exaggerate their importance. ..."

Disraeli said: "Life is too short to be little." "Those words," said Andre Maurois in This Week magazine, "have helped me through many a painful experience: often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. ... Here we are on this earth, with only a few more decades to live, and we lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year's time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worth-while actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings. For life is too short to be little."

Even so illustrious a figure as Rudyard Kipling forgot at times that "Life is too short to be little". The result? He and his brother-in-law fought the most famous court battle in the history of Vermont-a battle so celebrated that a book has been written about it: Rudyard Kipling's Vermont Feud.

The story goes like this: Kipling married a Vermont girl, Caroline Bales tier, built a lovely home in Attleboro, Vermont; settled down and expected to spend the rest of his life there. His brother-in-law, Beatty Bales tier, became Kipling's best friend. The two of them worked and played together.

Then Kipling bought some land from Bales tier, with the understanding that Bales tier would be allowed to cut hay off it each season. One day, Bales tier found Kipling laying out a flower garden on this Hatfield. His blood boiled. He hit the ceiling. Kipling fired right back. The air over the Green Mountains of Vermont turned blue!

A few days later, when Kipling was out riding his bicycle, his brother-in-law drove a wagon and a team of horses across the road suddenly and forced Kipling to take a spill. And Kipling the man who wrote: "If you can keep your head when all about you are

Losing theirs and blaming it on you"- he lost his own head, and swore out a warrant for Bales tier's arrest I Am sensational trial followed. Reporters from the big cities poured into the town. The news flashed around the world. Nothing was settled. This quarrel caused Kipling and his wife to abandon their American home for the rest of their lives. All that worry and bitterness over a mere trifle! A load of hay.

Pericles said, twenty-four centuries ago: "Come, gentlemen, we sit too long on trifles." We do, indeed!

Here is one of the most interesting stories that Dr. Harry Emerson Fossil ever told-a story about the battles won and lost by a giant of the forest:

On the slope of Long's Peak in Colorado lies the ruin of 3 gigantic tree. Naturalists tell us that it stood for some four hundred years. It was a seedling when Columbus landed at San Salvador, and half grown when the Pilgrims settled at Plymouth. During the course of its long life it was struck by lightning fourteen times, and the innumerable avalanches and storms of four centuries thundered past it. It survived them all. In the end, however, an army of beetles attacked the tree and leveled it to the ground. The insects ate their way through the bark and gradually destroyed the inner strength of the tree by their tiny but incessant attacks. A forest giant which age had not withered, nor lightning blasted, nor storms subdued, fell at last before beetles so small that a man could crush them between his forefinger and his thumb.

Aren't we all like that battling giant of the forest? Don't we manage somehow to survive the rare storms and avalanches and lightning blasts of We, only to let our hearts be eaten out by little beetles of worry-little beetles that could be crushed between a finger and a thumb?

A few years ago, I travelled through the Teton National Park, in Wyoming, with Charles Sacred, highway superintendent for the state of Wyoming, and some of his friends. We were all going to visit the John D. Rockefeller estate in the park. But the car in which I was riding took the wrong turn, got lost, and drove up to the entrance of the estate an hour after the other cars had gone in. Mr. Sacred had the key that unlocked the private gate, so he waited in the hot, mosquito-infested woods for an hour until we arrived. The mosquitoes were enough to drive a saint insane. But they couldn't triumph over Charles Sacred. While waiting for us, he cut a limb off an aspen tree-and made a whistle of it. When we arrived, was he cussing the mosquitoes? No, he was playing his whistle. I have kept that whistle as a memento of a man who knew how to put trifles in their place.

To break the worry habit before it breaks you, here is Rule 2:

Let's not allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. Remember "Life is too short to be little."

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 6

2025-05-31T09:36:00.000-07:00

Part Three - How To Break The Worry Habit Before It Breaks You

HOW TO CROWD WORRY OUT OF OUR MIND

I shall never forget the night, a few years ago, when Marion J. Douglas was a student in one of my classes. (I have not used his real name. He requested me, for personal reasons, not to reveal his identity.) But here is his real story as he told it before one of our adult-education classes. He told us how tragedy had struck at his home, not once, but twice. The first time he had lost his five-year-old daughter, a child he adored. He and his wife thought they couldn't endure that first loss; but, as he said: "Ten months later, God gave us another little girl-and she died in five days."

This double bereavement was almost too much to bear. "I couldn't take it," this father told us. "I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat, I couldn't rest or relax. My nerves were utterly shaken and my confidence gone." At last, he went to doctors; one recommended sleeping pills and another recommended a trip. He tried both, but neither remedy helped. He said: "My body felt as if it were encased in a vice, and the jaws of the vice were being drawn tighter and tighter." The tension of grief-if you have ever been paralyzed by sorrow, you know what he meant.

"But thank God, I had one child left-a four-year-old son. He gave me the solution to my problem. One afternoon as I sat around feeling sorry for myself, he asked: 'Daddy, will you build a boat for me?' I was in no mood to build a boat; in fact, I was in no mood to do anything. But my son is a persistent little fellow! I had to give in.

"Building that toy boat took about three hours. By the time it was finished, I realized that those three hours spent building that boat were the first hours of mental relaxation and peace that I had had in months!

"That discovery jarred me out of my lethargy and caused me to do a bit of thinking-the first real thinking I had done in months. I realized that it is difficult to worry while you are busy doing something that requires planning and thinking. In my case, building the boat had knocked worry out of the ring. So I resolved to keep busy.

"The following night, I went from room to room in the house, compiling a list of jobs that ought to be done. Scores of items needed to be repaired: bookcases, stair steps, storm windows, window-shades, knobs, locks, leaky taps. Astonishing as it seems, in the course of two weeks I had made a list of 242 items that needed attention.

"During the last two years I have completed most of them. Besides, I have filled my life with stimulating activities. Two nights per week I attend adult-education classes in New York. I have gone in for civic activities in my hometown, and I am now chairman of the school board. I attend scores of meetings. Furthermore, I help collect money for the Red Cross and other activities. Furthermore, I am so busy now that I have no time for worry."

No time for worry! That is exactly what Winston Churchill said when he was working eighteen hours a day at the height of the war. When he was asked if he worried about his tremendous responsibilities, he said: "I'm too busy. I have no time for worry."

Charles Kettering was in that same fix when he started out to invent a self-starter for automobiles. Mr. Kettering was, until his recent retirement, vice-president of General Motors in charge of the world-famous General Motors Research Corporation. But in those days, he was so poor that he had to use the hayloft of a barn as a laboratory. To buy groceries, he had to use fifteen hundred dollars that his wife had made by giving piano lessons; later, had to borrow five hundred dollars on his life insurance. I asked his

Wife if she wasn't worried at a time like that. "Yes," she replied, "I was so worried I couldn't sleep; but Mr. Kettering wasn't. He was too absorbed in his work to worry."

The great scientist, Pasteur, spoke of "the peace that is found in libraries and laboratories." Why is peace found there? Because the men in libraries and laboratories are usually too absorbed in their tasks to worry about themselves. Research men rarely have nervous breakdowns. They haven't time for such luxuries.

Why does such a simple thing as keeping busy help to drive out anxiety? Because of a law-one of the most fundamental laws ever revealed by psychology. And that law is: that it is utterly impossible for any human mind, no matter how brilliant, to think of more than one thing at any given time. You don't quite believe it? Very well, then, let's try an experiment.

Suppose you lean right back now, close your eyes, and try, at the same instant, to think of the Statue of Liberty and of what you plan to do tomorrow morning. (Go ahead, try it.)

You found out, didn't you, that you could focus on either thought in turn, but never on both simultaneously? Well, the same thing is true in the field of emotions. We cannot be pepped up and enthusiastic about doing something exciting and feel dragged down by worry at the very same time. One kind of emotion drives out the other. And it was that simple discovery that enabled Army psychiatrists to perform such miracles during the war.

When men came out of battle so shaken by the experience that they were called "psychoneurotic", Army doctors prescribed "Keep 'em busy" as a cure.

Every waking minute of these nerve-shocked men was filled with activity-usually outdoor activity, such as fishing, hunting, playing ball, golf, taking pictures, making gardens, and dancing. They were given no time for brooding over their terrible experiences.

"Occupational therapy" is the term now used by psychiatry when work is prescribed as though it were a medicine. It is not new. The old Greek physicians were advocating it five hundred years before Christ was born!

The Quakers were using it in Philadelphia in Ben Franklin's time. A man who visited a Quaker sanatorium in 1774 was shocked to see that the patients who were mentally ill were busy spinning flax. He thought these poor unfortunates were being exploited-until the Quakers explained that they found that their patients actually improved when they did a little work. It was soothing to the nerves.

Any psychiatrist will tell you that work-keeping busy-is one of the best anesthetics ever known for sick nerves. Henry W. Longfellow found that out for himself when he lost his young wife. His wife had been melting some sealing-wax at a candle one day, when her clothes caught on fire. Longfellow heard her cries and tried to reach her in time; but she died from the burns. For a while, Longfellow was so tortured by the memory of that dreadful experience that he nearly went insane; but, fortunately for him, his three small children needed his attention. In spite of his own grief, Longfellow undertook to be father and mother to his children. He took them for walks, told them stories, played games with them, and immortalized their companionship in his poem The Children's Hour. He also translated Dante; and all these duties combined kept him so busy that he forgot himself entirely, and regained his peace of mind. As Tennyson declared when he lost his most intimate friend, Arthur Halley: "I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair."

Most of us have little trouble "losing ourselves in action" while we have our noses to the grindstone and are doing our day's work. But the hours after work-they are the dangerous ones. Just when we're free to enjoy our own leisure, and ought to be happiest-that's when the blue devils of worry attack us. That's when we begin to wonder whether we're getting anywhere in life; whether we're in a rut; whether the boss "meant anything" by that remark he made today; or whether we're getting bald.

When we are not busy, our minds tend to become a near-vacuum. Every student of physics knows that "nature abhors a vacuum". The nearest thing to a vacuum that you and I will probably ever see is the inside of an incandescent electric-light bulb. Break that bulb-and nature forces air in to fill the theoretically empty space.

Nature also rushes in to fill the vacant mind. With what? Usually with emotions. Why? Because emotions of worry, fear, hate, jealousy, and envy are driven by primeval vigor and the dynamic energy of the jungle. Such emotions are so violent that they tend to drive out of our minds all peaceful, nappy thoughts and emotions.

James L. Murrell, professor of education, Teachers' College, Columbia, puts it very well when he says: "Worry is most apt to ride you ragged not when you are in action, but when the day's work is done. Your imagination can run riot then and bring up all sorts of ridiculous possibilities and magnify each little blunder. At such a time," he continues, "your mind is like a motor operating without its load. It races and threatens to burn out its bearings or even to tear itself to bits. The remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive."

But you don't have to be a college professor to realize this truth and put it into practice. During the war, I met a housewife from Chicago who told me how she discovered for herself that "the remedy for worry is to get completely occupied doing something constructive." I met this woman and her husband in the dining-car while I was travelling from New York to my farm in Missouri. (Sorry I didn't get their names-I never like to give examples without using names and street addresses-details that give authenticity to a story.)

This couple told me that their son had joined the armed forces the day after Pearl Harbor. The woman told me that she had almost wrecked her health worrying over that only son. Where was he? Was he safe? Or in action? Would he be wounded? Killed?

When I asked her how she overcame her worry, she replied: "I got busy." She told me that at first she had dismissed her maid and tried to keep busy by doing all her housework herself. But that didn't help much. "The trouble was," she said, "that I could do my housework almost mechanically, without using my mind. So I kept on worrying. While making the beds and washing the dishes I realized I needed some new kind of work that would keep me busy both mentally and physically every hour of the day. So I took a job as a saleswoman in a large department store.

"That did it," she said. "I immediately found myself in a whirlwind of activity: customers swarming around me, asking for prices, sizes, colors. Never a second to think of anything except my immediate duty; and when night came, I could think of nothing except getting off my aching feet. As soon as I ate dinner, I fell into bed and instantly became unconscious. I had neither the time nor the energy to worry."

She discovered for herself what John Cowper Powys meant when he said, in The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant: "A certain comfortable security, a certain profound inner peace, a kind of happy numbness, soothes the nerves of the human animal when absorbed in its allotted task."

And what a blessing that it is so! OSA Johnson, the world's most famous woman explorer, recently told me how she found release from worry and grief. You may have read the story of her life. It is called I Married Adventure. If any woman ever married adventure, she certainly did. Martin Johnson married her when she was sixteen and lifted her feet off the sidewalks of Canute, Kansas, and set them down on the wild jungle trails of Borneo. For a quarter of a century, this Kansas couple travelled all over the world, making motion pictures of the vanishing wild life of Asia and Africa. Back in America nine years ago, they were on a lecture tour, showing their famous films. They took a plane out of Denver, bound for the Coast. The plane plunged into a mountain. Martin Johnson was killed instantly. The doctors said OSA would never leave her bed again. But they didn't know OSA Johnson. Three months later, she was in a wheelchair, lecturing before large audiences. In fact, she addressed over a hundred audiences that season-all from a wheelchair. When I asked her why she did it, she replied: "I did it so that I would have no time for sorrow and worry."

OSA Johnson had discovered the same truth that Tennyson had sung about a century earlier: "I must lose myself in action, lest I wither in despair."

Admiral Byrd discovered this same truth when he lived all alone for five months in a shack that was literally buried in the great glacial ice-cap that covers the South Pole-an ice-cap that holds nature's oldest secrets-an ice-cap covering an unknown continent larger than the United States and Europe combined. Admiral Byrd spent five months there alone. No other living creature of any kind existed within a hundred miles. The cold was so intense that he could hear his breath freeze and crystallize as the wind blew it past his ears. In his book Alone, Admiral Byrd tells all about those five months he spent in bewildering and soul-shattering darkness. The days were as black as the nights. He had to keep busy to preserve his sanity.

"At night," he says, "before blowing out the lantern, I formed the habit of blocking out the morrow's work. It was a case of assigning myself an hour, say, to the Escape Tunnel, half an hour to leveling drift, an hour to straightening up the fuel drums, an hour to cutting bookshelves in the walls of the food tunnel, and two hours to renewing a broken bridge in the man-hauling sledge. ...

"It was wonderful," he says, "to be able to dole out time in this way. It brought me an extraordinary sense of command over myself. ..." And he adds: "Without that or an equivalent, the days would have been without purpose; and without purpose they would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration."

Note that last again: "Without purpose, the days would have ended, as such days always end, in disintegration."

If you and I are worried, let's remember that we can use good old-fashioned work as a medicine. That was said by no less an authority than the late Dr. Richard C. Cabot, formerly professor of clinical medicine at Harvard. In his book What Men Live By, Dr. Cabot says: "As a physician, I have had the happiness of seeing work cure many persons who have suffered from trembling palsy of the soul which results from overmastering doubts, hesitations, vacillation and fear. ... Courage given us by our work is like the self-reliance which Emerson has made forever glorious."

If you and I don't keep busy-if we sit around and brood-we will hatch out a whole flock of what Charles Darwin used to call the "Webber gibbers". And the "Webber gibbers" are nothing but old-fashioned gremlins that will run us hollow and destroy our power of action and our power of will.

I know a businessman in New York who fought the "Webber gibbers" by getting so busy that he had no time to fret and stew. His name is Temper Longman, and his office is at 40 Wall Street. He was a student in one of my adult-education classes; and his talk on conquering worry was so interesting, so impressive, that I asked him to have supper with me after class; and we sat in a restaurant until long past midnight, discussing his experiences. Here is the story he told me: "Eighteen years ago, I was so worried I had insomnia. I was tense, irritated, and jittery. I felt I was headed for a nervous breakdown.

"I had reason to be worried. I was treasurer of the Crown Fruit and Extract Company, 418 West Broadway, New York. We had half a million dollars invested in strawberries packed in gallon tins. For twenty years, we had been selling these gallon tins of strawberries to manufactures of ice cream. Suddenly our sales stopped because the big ice-cream makers, such as National Dairy and Borden's, were rapidly increasing their production and were saving money and time by buying strawberries packed in barrels.

"Not only were we left with half a million dollars in berries we couldn't sell, but we were also under contract to buy a million dollars more of strawberries in the next twelve months! We had already borrowed $350,000 from the banks. We couldn't possibly pay off or renew these loans. No wonder I was worried!

"I rushed out to Watsonville, California, where our factory was located, and tried to persuade our president that conditions had changed, that we were facing ruin. He refused to believe it. He blamed our New York office for all the trouble-poor salesmanship.

"After days of pleading, I finally persuaded him to stop packing more strawberries and to sell our new supply on the fresh berry market in San Francisco. That almost solved our problems. I should have been able to stop worrying then; but I couldn't. Worry is a habit; and I had that habit.

"When I returned to New York, I began worrying about everything; the cherries we were buying in Italy, the pineapples we were buying in Hawaii, and so on. I was tense, jittery, couldn't sleep; and, as I have already said, I was heading for a nervous breakdown.

"In despair, I adopted a way of life that cured my insomnia and stopped my worries. I got busy. I got so busy with problems demanding all my faculties that I had no time to worry. Furthermore, I had been working seven hours a day. Furthermore, I now began working fifteen and sixteen hours a day. Furthermore, I got down to the office every morning at eight o'clock and stayed there every night until almost midnight. Furthermore, I took on new duties, new responsibilities. When I got home at midnight, I was so exhausted when I fell in bed that I became unconscious in a few seconds.

"I kept up this program for about three months. I had broken the habit of worry by that time, so I returned to a normal working day of seven or eight hours. This event occurred eighteen years ago. I have never been troubled with insomnia or worry since then."

George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: "The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not." So don't bother to think about it! Spit on your hands and get busy. Your blood will start circulating; your mind will start ticking -and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It's the cheapest kind of medicine there is on this earth-and one of the best.

To break the worry habit, here is Rule 1:

Keep busy. The worried person must lose himself in action, lest be withered in despair.

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 5

2025-05-31T09:34:00.000-07:00

HOW TO ELIMINATE FIFTY PERCENT OF TOUR BUSINESS WORRIES

IF you are a businessman, you are probably saying to yourself right now: "The title of this chapter is ridiculous. I have been running my business for nineteen years; and I certainly know the answers if anybody does. The idea of anybody trying to tell me how I can eliminate fifty percent of my business worries-it's absurd I"

Fair enough-I would have felt exactly the same way myself a few years ago if I had seen this title on a chapter. It promises a lot-and promises are cheap.

Let's be very frank about it: maybe I won't be able to help you eliminate fifty percent of your business worries. In the last analysis, no one can do that, except yourself. But what I can do is to show you how other people have done it-and leave the rest to you!

You may recall that on of this book I quoted the world-famous Dr. Alexis Carrel as saying: "businessmen who do not know how to fight worry die young."

Since worry is that serious, wouldn't you be satisfied if I could help you eliminate even ten percent of your worries? ... Yes? ... Good! Well, I am going to show you how one business executive eliminated not fifty percent of his worries, but seventy-five percent of all the time he formerly spent in conferences, trying to solve business problems.

Furthermore, I am not going to tell you this story about a "Mr. Jones" or a "Mr. X" or "or a man I know in Ohio"- vague stories that you can't check up on. It concerns a very real person-Leon Shim kin, a partner and general manager of one of the foremost publishing houses in the United States: Simon and Schuster, Rockefeller Centre, New York 20, New York.

Here is Leon Shim kin's experience in his own words:

"For fifteen years I spent almost half of every business day holding conferences, discussing problems. Should we do this or that-do nothing at all? We would get tense; twist in our chairs; walk the floor; argue and go around in circles. When night came, I would be utterly exhausted. I fully expected to go on doing this sort of thing for the rest of my life. I had been doing it for fifteen years, and it never occurred to me that there was a better way of doing it. If anyone had told me that I could eliminate three-fourths of all the time I spent in those worried conferences, and three-fourths of my nervous strain-I would have thought he was a wild-eyed, slap-happy, armchair optimist. Yet I devised a plan that did just that. I have been using this plan for eight years. It has performed wonders for my efficiency, my health, and my happiness.

"It sounds like magic-but like all magic tricks, it is extremely simple when you see how it is done.

"Here is the secret: First, I immediately stopped the procedure I had been using in my conferences for fifteen years-a procedure that began with my troubled associates reciting all the details of what had gone wrong, and ending up by asking: 'What shall we do?' Second, I made a new rule-a rule that everyone who wishes to present a problem to me must first prepare and submit a memorandum answering these four questions:

"Question 1: What is the problem?

("In the old days we used to spend an hour or two in a worried conference without anyone's knowing specifically and concretely what the real problem was. We used to work ourselves into a lather discussing our troubles without ever troubling to write out specifically what our problem was.)

"Question 2: What is the cause of the problem?

("As I look back over my career, I am appalled at the wasted hours I have spent in worried conferences without ever trying to find out clearly the conditions which lay at the root of the problem.)

"Question 3: What are all possible solutions of the problem?

("In the old days, one man in the conference would suggest one solution. Someone else would argue with him. Tempers would flare. We would often get clear off the subject, and at the end of the conference no one would have written down all the various things we could do to attack the problem.)

"Question 4: What solution do you suggest?

("I used to go into a conference with a man who had spent hours worrying about a situation and going around in circles without ever once thinking through all possible solutions and then writing down: 'This is the solution I recommend.')

"My associates rarely come to me now with their problems. Why? Because they have discovered that in order to answer these four questions they have to get all the facts and think their problems through. And after they have done that they find, in three-fourths of the cases, they don't have to consult me at all, because the proper solution has popped out like a piece of bread popping out from an electric toaster. Even in those cases where consultation is necessary, the discussion takes about one-third the time formerly required, because it proceeds along an orderly, logical path to a reasoned conclusion.

"Much less time is now consumed in the house of Simon and Schuster in worrying and talking about what is wrong; and a lot more action is obtained toward making those things right."

My friend, Frank Better, one of the top insurance men in America, tells me he not only reduced his business worries, but nearly doubled his income, by a similar method.

"Years ago," says Frank Better, "when I first started to sell insurance, I was filled with a boundless enthusiasm and love for my work. Then something happened. I became so discouraged that I despised my work and thought of giving it up. I think I would have quit-if I hadn't got the idea, one Saturday morning, of sitting down and trying to get at the root of my worries.

"1. I asked myself first: 'Just what is the problem?.' The problem was: that I was not getting high enough returns for the staggering amount of calls I was making. I seemed

To do pretty well at selling a prospect, until the moment came for closing a sale. Then the customer would say: 'Well, I'll think it over, Mr. Better. Come and see me again.' It was the time I wasted on these follow-up calls that was causing my depression.

"2. I asked myself: 'What are the possible solutions?' But to get the answer to that one, I had to study the facts. I got out my record book for the last twelve months and studied the figures.

"I made an astounding discovery! Right there in black and white, I discovered that seventy percent of my sales had been closed on the very first interview! Twenty-three percent of my sales had been closed on the second interview! And only seven percent of my sales had been closed on those third, fourth, fifth, etc., interviews, which were running me ragged and taking up my time. In other words, I was wasting fully one half of my working day on a part of my business which was responsible for only seven percent of my sales!

"3. 'What is the answer?' The answer was obvious. I immediately cut out all visits beyond the second interview, and spent the extra time building up new prospects. The results were unbelievable. In a very short time, I had almost doubled the cash value of every visit I made from a call!"

As I said, Frank Better is now one of the best-known life-insurance salesmen in America. He is with Fidelity Mutual of Philadelphia, and writes a million dollars' worth of policies a year. But he was on the point of giving up. He was on the point of admitting failure-until analyzing the problem gave him a boost on the road to success.

Can you apply these questions to your business problems? To repeat my challenge-they can reduce your worries by fifty percent. Here they are again:

1. What is the problem?

2. What is the CAUSE of the problem?

3. What are all possible solutions to the problem? 4. What solution do you suggest?

~~~~~~~

Part Two In A Nutshell

RULE 1: Get the facts. Remember that Dean Hawks of Columbia University said that" half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision."

RULE 2: After carefully weighing all the facts, come to a decision.

RULE 3: Once a decision is carefully reached, act! Get busy carrying out your decision-and dismiss all anxiety about the outcome.

RULE 4: When you, or any of your associates are tempted to worry about a problem, write out and answer the following questions:

a. What is the problem?

b. What is the cause of the problem?

c. What are all possible solutions?

d. What is the best solution?

~~~~~~~~~~

Nine Suggestions on How to Get the Most Out of This Book

1. If you wish to get the most out of this book, there is one indispensable requirement, one essential infinitely more important than any rules or technique. Unless you have this one fundamental requisite a thousand rules on how to study will avail little. And if you do have this cardinal endowment, then you can achieve wonders without reading any suggestions for getting the most out of a book.

What is this magic requirement? Just this: a deep, driving desire to learn, a vigorous determination to stop worrying and start living.

How can you develop such an urge? By constantly reminding yourself of how important these principles are to you. Picture to yourself how their mastery will aid you in living a richer, happier life. Say to yourself over and over: "My peace of mind, my happiness, my health, and perhaps even my income will, in the long run, depend largely on applying the old, obvious, and eternal truths taught in this book."

2. Read each chapter rapidly at first to get a bird's-eye view of it. You will probably be tempted then to rush on to the next one. But don't. Unless you are reading merely for entertainment. But if you are reading because you want to stop worrying and start living, then go back and re-read each chapter thoroughly. In the long run, this will mean saving time and getting results.

3. Stop frequently in your reading to think over what you are reading. Ask yourself just how and when you can apply each suggestion. That kind of reading will aid you far more than racing ahead like a whippet chasing a rabbit.

4. Read with a red crayon, pencil, or fountain-pen in your hand; and when you come across a suggestion that you feel you can use, draw a line beside it. If it is a four-star suggestion, then underscore every sentence, or mark it with "XXX". Marking and underscoring a book make it more interesting, and far easier to review rapidly.

5. I know a man who has been office manager for a large insurance concern for fifteen years. He reads every month all the insurance contracts his company issues. Yes, he reads the same contracts over month after month, year after year. Why? Because experience has taught him that that is the only way he can keep their provisions clearly in mind.

I once spent almost two years writing a book on public speaking; and yet I find I have to keep going back over it from time to time in order to remember what I wrote in my own book. The rapidity with which we forget is astonishing.

So, if you want to get a real, lasting benefit out of this book, don't imagine that skimming through it once will suffice. After reading, it thoroughly, you ought to spend a few hours reviewing it every month. Keep it on your desk in front of you every day. Glance through it often. Keep constantly impressing yourself with the rich possibilities for improvement that still lie in the offing. Remember that the use of these principles can be made habitual and unconscious only by a constant and vigorous campaign of review and application. There is no other way.

6. Bernard Shaw once remarked: "If you teach a man anything, he will never learn." Shaw was right. Learning is an active process. We learn by doing. So, if you desire to master the principles you are studying in this book, do something about them. Apply

These rules at every opportunity. If you don't, you will forget them quickly. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

You will probably find it difficult to apply these suggestions all the time. I know, because I wrote this book, and yet frequently I find it difficult to apply everything I have advocated here. So, as you read this book, remember that you are not merely trying to acquire information. You are attempting to form new habits. Ah yes, you are attempting a new way of life. That will require time and persistence and daily application.

So refer to these pages often. Regard this as a working handbook on conquering worry; and when you are confronted with some trying problem-don't get all stirred up. Don't do the natural thing, the impulsive thing. That is usually wrong.

Instead, turn to these pages and review the paragraphs you have underscored. Then try these new ways and watch, them achieve magic for you.

7. Offer your wife a shilling every time she catches you violating one of the principles advocated in this book. She will break you!

8. Please turn to pages 193-4 of this book and read how the Wall Street banker, H.P. Howell, and old Ben Franklin corrected their mistakes. Why don't you use the Howell and Franklin techniques to check up on your application of the principles discussed in this book? If you do, two things will result.

First, you will find yourself engaged in an educational process that is both intriguing and priceless.

Second, you will find that your ability to stop worrying and start living will grow and spread like a Green Bay tree.

9. Keep a diary-a diary in which you ought to record your triumphs in the application of these principles. Be specific. Give names, dates, results. Keeping such a record will inspire you to greater efforts; and how fascinating these entries will be when you chance upon them some evening, years from now!

~~~~~~~

In A Nutshell

1. Develop a deep, driving desire to master the principles of conquering worry.

2. Read each chapter twice before going on to the next one.

3. As you read, stop frequently to ask yourself how you can apply each suggestion. 4. Underscore each important idea.

5. Review this book each month.

6. Apply these principles at every opportunity. Use this volume as a working handbook to help you solve your daily problems.

7. Make a lively game put of your learning by offering some friend a shilling every time he catches you violating one of these principles.

8. Check up each week on the progress you are making. Ask yourself what mistakes you have made, what improvement, what lessons you have learned for the future. 9. Keep a diary in the back of this book showing how and when you have applied these principles.

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 4

2025-05-31T09:33:00.000-07:00

HOW TO Analyze AND SOLVE WORRY PROBLEMS

I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew):

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

-Rudyard Kipling

Will the magic formula of Willis H. Carrier, described in Part One, Chapter 2, solve all worry problems? No, of course not. Then what is the answer? The answer is that we must equip ourselves to deal with different kinds of worries by learning the three basic steps of problem analysis. The three steps are:

1. Get the facts.

2. Analyze the facts.

3. Arrive at a decision-and then act on that decision.

Obvious stuff? Yes, Aristotle taught it-and used it. And you and I must use it too if we are going to solve the problems that are harassing us and turning our days and nights into veritable tells.

Let's take the first rule: Get the facts. Why is it so important to get the facts? Because unless we have the facts we can't possibly even attempt to solve our problem intelligently. Without the facts, all we can do is stew around in confusion. My idea? No, that was the idea of the late Herbert E. Hawks, Dean of Columbia College, Columbia University, for twenty-two years. He had helped two hundred thousand students solve their worry problems; and he told me that "confusion is the chief cause of worry". He put it this way-he said: "Half the worry in the world is caused by people trying to make decisions before they have sufficient knowledge on which to base a decision. For example," he said, "if I have a problem which has to be faced at three o'clock next Tuesday, I refuse even to try to make a decision about it until next Tuesday arrives. In the meantime, I concentrate on getting all the facts that bear on the problem. I don't worry," he said, "I don't agonize over my problem. I don't lose any sleep. Furthermore, I simply concentrate on getting the facts. And by the time Tuesday rolls around, if I've got all the facts, the problem usually solves itself!"

I asked Dean Hawks if this meant he had licked worry entirely. "Yes," he said, "I think I can honestly say that my live is now almost totally devoid of worry. I have found," he went on, "that if a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries usually evaporate in the light of knowledge."

Let me repeat that: "If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge."

But what do most of us do ? If we bother with facts at all- and Thomas Edison said in all seriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking"-if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think-and ignore all the others! We want only the facts that justify our acts-the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices!

As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage."

Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems? Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, if we went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot of people in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that two plus two equals five-or maybe five hundred!

What can we do about it? We have to keep our emotions out of our thinking; and, as Dean Hawks put it, we must secure the facts in "an impartial, objective" manner.

That is not an easy task when we are worried. When we are worried, our emotions are riding high. But here are two ideas that I have found helpful when trying to step aside from my problems, in order to see the facts in a clear, objective manner.

1. When trying to get the facts, I pretend that I am collecting this information not for myself, but for some other person. This helps me to take a cold, impartial view of the evidence. This helps me eliminate my emotions.

2. While trying to collect the facts about the problem that is worrying me, I sometimes pretend that I am a lawyer preparing to argue the other side of the issue. In other words, I try to get all the facts against myself-all the facts that are damaging to my wishes, all the facts I don't like to face.

Then I write down both my side of the case and the other side of the case-and I generally find that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremities.

Here is the point I am trying to make. Neither you nor I nor Einstein nor the Supreme Court of the United States is brilliant enough to reach an intelligent decision on any problem without first getting the facts. Thomas Edison knew that. At the time of his death, he had two thousand five hundred notebooks filled with facts about the problems he was facing.

So Rule 1 for solving our problems is: Get the facts. Let's do what Dean Hawks did: let's not even attempt to solve our problems without first collecting all the facts in an impartial manner.

However, getting all the facts in the world won't do us any good until we analyze them and interpret them.

I have found from costly experience that it is much easier to analyze the facts after writing them Sown. In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us to reach a sensible decision. As Charles Kettering puts it: "A problem well stated is a problem half solved."

Let me show you all this as it works out in practice. Since the Chinese say one picture is worth ten thousand words, suppose I show you a picture of how one man put exactly what we are talking about into concrete action.

Let's take the case of Galen Litchfield-a man I have known for several years; one of the most successful American businessmen in the Far East. Mr. Litchfield was in China in 1942, when the Japanese invaded Shanghai. And here is his story as he told it to me while a guest in my home:

"Shortly after the Japs took Pearl Harbor," Galen Litchfield began, "they came swarming into Shanghai. I was the manager of the Asia Life Insurance Company in Shanghai. They sent us an 'army liquidator'-he was really an admiral- and gave me orders to assist this man in liquidating our assets. I didn't have any choice in the matter. I could co-operate-or else. And the 'or else' was certain death.

"I went through the motions of doing what I was told, because I had no alternative. But there was one block of securities, worth $750,000, which I left off the list I gave to the admiral. I left that block of securities off the list because they belonged to our Hong Kong organization and had nothing to do with the Shanghai assets. All the same, I feared I might be in hot water if the Japs found out what I had done. And they soon found out.

"I wasn't in the office when the discovery was made, but my head accountant was there. He told me that the Jap admiral flew into a rage, and stamped and swore, and called me a thief and a traitor! I had defied the Japanese Army! I knew what that meant. Furthermore, I would be thrown into the Bridge house!

"The Bridge house 1 The torture chamber of the Japanese Gestapo! I had had personal friends who had killed themselves rather than be taken to that prison. I had had other

Friends who had died in that place after ten days of questioning and torture. Now I was slated for the Bridge house myself!

"What did I do? I heard the news on Sunday afternoon. I suppose I should have been terrified. And I would have been terrified if I hadn't had a definite technique for solving my problems. For years, whenever I was worried I had always gone to my typewriter and written down two questions-and the answers to these questions:

"1. What am I worrying about?

"2. What can I do about it?

"I used to try to answer those questions without writing them down. But I stopped that years ago. I found that writing down both the questions and the answers clarifies my thinking.

So, that Sunday afternoon, I went directly to my room at the Shanghai Y.M.C.A. and got out my typewriter. I wrote: "I. What am I worrying about?

I am afraid I will be thrown into the Bridge house tomorrow morning.

"Then I typed out the second question:

"2. What can I do about it?

"I spent hours thinking out and writing down the four courses of action I could take-and what the probable consequence of each action would be.

1. I can try to explain to the Japanese admiral. But he "no speak English". If I try to explain to him through an interpreter, I may stir him up again. That might mean death, for he is cruel, would rather dump me in the Bridge house than bother talking about it.

2. I can try to escape. Impossible. They keep track of me all the time. I have to check in and out of my room at the Y.M.C.A. If I try to escape, I'll probably be captured and shot.

3. I can stay here in my room and not go near the office again. If I do, the Japanese admiral will be suspicion, will probably send soldiers to get me and throw me into the Bridge-house without giving me a chance to say a word.

4. I can go down to the office as usual on Monday morning. If I do, there is a chance that the Japanese admiral may be so busy that he will not think of what I did. Even if he does think of it, he may have cooled off and may not bother me. If this happens, I am all right. Even if he does bother me, I'll still have a chance to try to explain to him. So, going down to the office as usual on Monday morning, and acting as if nothing had gone wrong gives me two chances to escape the Bridge-house.

"As soon as I thought it all out and decided to accept the fourth plan-to go down to the office as usual on Monday morning-I felt immensely relieved.

"When I entered the office the next morning, the Japanese admiral sat there with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He glared at me as he always did; and said nothing. Six weeks later-thank God-he went back to Tokyo and my worries were ended.

"As I have already said, I probably saved my life by sitting down that Sunday afternoon and writing out all the various steps I could take and then writing down the probable

Consequences of each step and calmly coming to a decision. If I hadn't done that, I might have floundered and hesitated and done the wrong thing on the spur of the moment. If I hadn't thought out my problem and come to a decision, I would have been frantic with worry all Sunday afternoon. I wouldn't have slept that night. I would have gone down to the office Monday morning with a harassed and worried look; and that alone might have aroused the suspicion of the Japanese admiral and spurred him to act.

"Experience has proved to me, time after time, the enormous value of arriving at a decision. It is the failure to arrive at a fixed purpose, the inability to stop going round and round in maddening circles, that drives men to nervous breakdowns and living tells. I find that fifty percent of my worries vanishes once I arrive at a clear, definite decision; and another forty percent usually vanishes once I start to carry out that decision.

"So I banish about ninety percent of my worries by taking these four steps:

"1. Writing down precisely what I am worrying about. "2. Writing down what I can do about it.

"3. Deciding what to do.

"4. Starting immediately to carry out that decision."

Galen Litchfield is now the Far Eastern Director for Starr, Park and Freeman, Inc., III John Street, New York, representing large insurance and financial interests.

In fact, as I said before, Galen Litchfield today is one of the most important American businessmen in Asia; and he confesses to me that he owes a large part of his success to this method of analyzing worry and meeting it head-on.

Why is his method so superb? Because it is efficient, concrete, and goes directly to the heart of the problem. On top of all that, it is climaxed by the third and indispensable rule: Do something about it. Unless we carry out our action, all our fact-finding and analysis is whistling upwind-it's a sheer waste of energy.

William James said this: "When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome." In this case, William James undoubtedly used the word "care" as a synonym for "anxiety".) He meant-once you have made a careful decision based on facts, go into action. Don't stop to reconsider. Don't begin to hesitate worry and retrace your steps. Don't lose yourself in self-doubting which begets other doubts. Don't keep looking back over your shoulder.

I once asked Waite Phillips, one of Oklahoma's most prominent oil men, how he carried out decisions. He replied: "I find that to keep thinking about our problems beyond a certain point is bound to create confusion and worry. There comes a time when any more investigation and thinking are harmful. There comes a time when we must decide and act and never look back."

Why don't you employ Galen Litchfield's technique to one of your worries right now?

Here is question No. 1 -What am I worrying about? (Please pencil the answer to that question in the space below.)

Question No. 2 -What can I do about it? (Please write your answer to that question in the space below.)

Question No. 3 -Here is what I am going to do about it.

Question No. 4 -When am I going to start doing it?

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 3

2025-05-31T09:01:00.000-07:00

WHAT WORRY MAY DO TO YOU

Businessmen who do not know how to fight worry die young.

-DR. Alexis Carrel.

Some time ago, a neighbor rang my doorbell one evening and urged me and my family to be vaccinated against smallpox. He was only one of thousands of volunteers who were ringing doorbells all over New York City. Frightened people stood in lines for hours at a time to be vaccinated. Vaccination stations were opened not only in all hospitals,

But also in fire-houses, police precincts, and in large industrial plants. More than two thousand doctors and nurses worked feverishly day and night, vaccinating crowds. The cause of all this excitement? Eight people in New York City had smallpox-and two had died. Two deaths out of a population of almost eight million.

Now, I have lived in New York for over thirty-seven years, and no one has ever yet rung my doorbell to warn me against the emotional sickness of worry-an illness that, during the last thirty-seven years, has caused ten thousand times more damage than smallpox.

No doorbell ringer has ever warned me that one person out of ten now living in these United States will have a nervous breakdown-induced in the vast majority of cases by worry and emotional conflicts. So I am writing this chapter to ring your doorbell and warn you.

The great Nobel prizewinner in medicine, Dr. Alexis Carrel, said: "businessmen who do not know how to fight worry die young." And so do housewives and horse doctors and bricklayers.

A few years ago, I spent my vacation motoring through Texas and New Mexico with Dr. O. F. Oberon of the medical executives of the Santa Fe railway. His exact title was chief physician of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Hospital Association. We got to talking about the effects of worry, and he said: Seventy percent of all patients who come to physicians could cure themselves if they only got rid of their fears and worries. Don't think for a moment that I mean that their ills are imaginary," he said. "Their ills are as real as a throbbing toothache and sometimes a hundred times more serious. I refer to such illnesses as nervous indigestion, some stomach ulcers, heart disturbances, insomnia, some headaches, and some types of paralysis.

"These illnesses are real. I know what I am talking about," said Dr. Sober, "for I myself suffered from a stomach ulcer for twelve years.

"Fear causes worry. Worry makes you tense and nervous and affects the nerves of your stomach and actually changes the gastric juices of your stomach from normal to abnormal and often leads to stomach ulcers."

Dr. Joseph F. Montague, author of the book Nervous Stomach Trouble, says much the same thing. He says: "You do not get stomach ulcers from what you eat. You get ulcers from what is eating you."

Dr. W.C. Alvarez, of the Mayo Clinic, said "Ulcers frequently flare up or subside according to the hills and valleys of emotional stress."

That statement was backed up by a study of 15,000 patients treated for stomach disorders at the Mayo Clinic. Four out of five had no physical basis whatever for their stomach illnesses. Fear, worry, hate, supreme selfishness, and the inability to adjust themselves to the world of reality-these were largely the causes of their stomach illnesses and stomach ulcers. ... Stomach ulcers can kill you. According to Life magazine, they now stand tenth in our list of fatal diseases.

I recently had some correspondence with Dr. Harold C. Laban of the Mayo Clinic. He read a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association of Industrial Physicians and Surgeons, saying that he had made a study of 176 business executives whose average age was 44.3 years. He reported that slightly more than a third of these executives suffered from one of three ailments peculiar to high-tension living-heart disease, digestive-tract ulcers, and high blood pressure. Think of it- a third of our

Business executives are wrecking their bodies with heart disease, ulcers, and high blood pressure before they even reach forty-five. What price success! And they aren't even buying success! Can any man possibly be a success who is paying for business advancement with stomach ulcers and heart trouble? What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world-and loses his health? Even if he owned the whole world, he could sleep in only one bed at a time and eat only three meals a day. Even a ditch-digger can do that-and probably sleep more soundly and enjoy his food more than a high-powered executive. Frankly, I would rather be a share-cropper down in Alabama with a banjo on my knee than wreck my health at forty-five by trying to run a railroad or a cigarette company.

And speaking of cigarettes-the best-known cigarette manufacturer in the world recently dropped dead from heart failure while trying to take a little recreation in the Canadian woods. He amassed millions-and fell dead at sixty-one. He probably traded years of his life for what is called "business success".

In my estimation, this cigarette executive with all his millions was not half as successful as my father-a Missouri farmer-who died at eighty-nine without a dollar.

The famous Mayo brothers declared that more than half of our hospital beds are occupied by people with nervous troubles. Yet, when the nerves of these people are studied under a high-powered microscope in a post-mortem examination, their nerves in most cases are apparently as healthy as the nerves of Jack Dempsey. Their "nervous troubles" are caused not by a physical deterioration of the nerves, but by emotions of futility, frustration, anxiety, worry, fear, defeat, despair. Plato said that "the greatest mistake physicians make is that they attempt to cure the body without attempting to cure the mind; yet the mind and body are one and should not be treated separately!"

It took medical science twenty-three hundred years to recognize this great truth. We are just now beginning to develop a new kind of medicine called psychosomatic medicine-a medicine that treats both the mind and the body. It is high time we were doing that, for medical science has largely wiped out the terrible diseases caused by physical germs--diseases such as smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, and scores of other scourges that swept untold millions into untimely graves. But medical science has been unable to cope with the mental and physical wrecks caused, not by germs, but by emotions of worry, fear, hate, frustration, and despair. Casualties caused by these emotional diseases are mounting and spreading with catastrophic rapidity.

Doctors figure that one American in every twenty now alive will spend a part of his life in an institution for the mentally ill. One out of every six of our young men called up by the draft in the Second World War was rejected as mentally diseased or defective.

What causes insanity? No one knows all the answers. But it is highly probable that in many cases fear and worry are contributing factors. The anxious and harassed individual who is unable to cope with the harsh world of reality breaks off all contact with his environment and retreats into a private dream world of his own making, and this solves his worry problems.

As I write I have on my desk a book by Dr. Edward Pools entitled Stop Worrying and Get Well. Here are some of the chapter titles in that book:

What Worry Does To The Heart

High Blood Pressure Is Fed By Worry

Rheumatism Can Be Caused By Worry

Worry Less For Your Stomach's Sake

How Worry Can Cause A Cold

Worry And The Thyroid

The Worrying Diabetic

Another illuminating book about worry is lion Against Himself, by Dr. Karl Meninges, one of the "Mayo brothers of psychiatry." Dr. Meninges's book is a startling revelation of what you do to yourself when you permit destructive emotions to dominate your life. If you want to stop working against yourself, get this book. Read it. Give it to your friends. It costs four dollars-and is one of the best investments you can make in this life.

Worry can make even the most stolid person ill. General Grant discovered that during the closing days of the Civil War. The story goes like this: Grant had been besieging Richmond for nine months. General Lee's troops, ragged and hungry, were beaten. Entire regiments were deserting at a time. Others were holding prayer meetings in their tents-shouting, weeping, seeing visions. The end was close. Lee's men set fire to the cotton and tobacco warehouses in Richmond, burned the arsenal, and fled from the city at night while towering flames roared up into darkness. Grant was in hot pursuit, banging away at the Confederates from both sides and the rear, while Sheridan's cavalry was heading them off in front, tearing up railway lines and capturing supply trains.

Grant, half blind with a violent sick headache, fell behind his army and stopped at a farmhouse. "I spent the night," he records in his Memoirs, "in bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning."

The next morning, he was cured instantaneously. And the tiling that cured him was not a mustard plaster, but a horseman galloping down the road with a letter from Lee, saying he wanted to surrender.

"When the officer [bearing the message] reached me," Grant wrote, "I was still suffering with the sick headache, but the instant I saw the contents of the note, I was cured."

Obviously it was Grant's worries, tensions, and emotions that made him ill. He was cured instantly the moment his emotions took on the hue of confidence, achievement, and victory.

Seventy years later, Henry Morgenthaler, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury in Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet, discovered that worry could make him so ill that he was dizzy. He records in his diary that he was terribly worried when the President, in order to raise the price of wheat, bought 4,400,000 bushels in one day. He says in his diary: "I felt literally dizzy while the thing was going on. I went home and went to bed for two hours after lunch."

If I want to see what worry does to people, I don't have to go to a library or a physician. I can look out of the window of my home where I am writing this book; and I can see, within one block, one house where worry caused a nervous breakdown-and another house where a man worried himself into diabetes. When the stock market went down, the sugar in his blood and urine went up.

When Montaigne, the illustrious French philosopher, was elected Mayor of his home town-Bordeaux-he said to his fellow citizens: "I am willing to take your affairs into my hands but not into my liver and lungs."

This neighbor of mine took the affairs of the stock market into the blood stream-and almost killed himself.

Worry can put you into a wheelchair with rheumatism and arthritis. Dr. Russell L. Cecil, of the Cornell University Medical School, is a world-recognized authority on arthritis; and he has listed four of the commonest conditions that bring on arthritis:

1. Marital shipwreck.

2. Financial disaster and grief.

3. Loneliness and worry.

4. Long-cherished resentments.

Naturally, these four emotional situations are far from being the only causes of arthritis. There are many different kinds of arthritis-due to various causes. But, to repeat, the commonest conditions that bring on arthritis are the four listed by Dr. Russell L. Cecil. For example, a friend of mine was so hard bit during the depression that the gas company shut off the gas and the bank foreclosed the mortgage on the house. His wife suddenly had a painful attack of arthritis-and, in spite of medicine and diets, the arthritis continued until their financial situation improved.

Worry can even cause tooth decay. Dr. William I.L. McGonigal said in an address before the American Dental Association that "unpleasant emotions such as those caused by worry, fear, nagging ... may upset the body's calcium balance and cause tooth decay". Dr. McGonigal told of a patient of his who had always had a perfect set of teeth until he began to worry over his wife's sudden illness. During the three weeks she was in the hospital, he developed nine cavities-cavities brought on by worry.

Have you ever seen a person with an acutely over-active thyroid? I have, and I can tell you they tremble; they shake; they look like someone half scared to death-and that's about what it amounts to. The thyroid gland, the gland that regulates the body, has been thrown out of kilter. It speeds up the heart -the whole body is roaring away at full blast like a furnace with all its drafts wide open. And if this isn't checked, by operation or treatment, the victim may die, may "burn himself out".

A short time ago I went to Philadelphia with a friend of mine who has this disease. We went to see a famous specialist, a doctor who has been treating this type of ailment for thirty-eight years. And what sort of advice do you suppose he had hanging on the wall of his waiting-room-painted on a large wooden sign so all his patients could see it? Here it is. I copied it down on the back of an envelope while I was waiting:

Relaxation and Recreation

The most relaxing recreating forces are a healthy religion, sleep, music, and laughter.

Have faith in God-learn to sleep well-

Love good music-see the funny side of life-

And health and happiness will be yours.

The first question he asked this friend of mine was: "What emotional disturbance brought on this condition?" He warned my friend that, if he didn't stop worrying, he could get other complications: heart trouble, stomach ulcers, or diabetes. "All of these diseases," said that eminent doctor, "are cousins, first cousins." Sure, they're first cousins-they're all worry diseases!

When I interviewed Merle Oberon, she told me that she refused to worry because she knew that worry would destroy her chief asset on the motion-picture screen: her good looks.

"When I first tried to break into the movies," she told me, "I was worried and scared. I had just come from India, and I didn't know anyone in London, where I was trying to get a job. I saw a few producers, but none of them hired me; and the little money I had begun to give out. For two weeks I lived on nothing but crackers and water. I was not only worried now. I was hungry. Furthermore, I said to myself: 'Maybe you're a fool. Maybe you will never break into the movies. After all, you have no experience, you've never acted at all-what have you to offer but a rather pretty face?'

"I went to the mirror. And when I looked in that mirror, I saw what worry was doing to my looks! I saw the lines it was forming. I saw the anxious expression. So I said to myself: 'You've got to stop this at once! You can't afford to worry. The only thing you have to offer at all is your looks, and worry will ruin them I'"

Few things can age and sour a woman and destroy her looks as quickly as worry. Worry curdles the expression. It makes us clench our jaws and lines our faces with wrinkles. It forms a permanent scowl. Furthermore, it may turn the hair gray, and in some cases, even make it fall out. Furthermore, it can ruin the complexion- it can bring on all kinds of skin rashes, eruptions, and pimples.

Heart disease, is the number-one killer in America today. During the Second World War, almost a third of a million men were killed in combat; but during that same period, heart disease killed two million civilians-and one million of those casualties were caused by the kind of heart disease that is brought on by worry and high-tension living. Yes, heart disease is one of the chief reasons why Dr. Alexis Carrel said: "businessmen who do not know how to fight worry die young."

The Negroes down south and the Chinese rarely have the kind of heart disease brought on by worry, because they take things calmly. Twenty times as many doctors as farmworkers die from heart failure. The doctors lead tense lives-and pay the penalty.

"The Lord may forgive us our sins," said William James, "but the nervous system never does."

Here is a startling and almost incredible fact: more Americans commit suicide each year than die from the five most common communicable diseases.

Why? The answer is largely: "Worry."

When the cruel Chinese warlords wanted to torture their prisoners, they would tie their prisoners hand and foot and put them under a bag of water that constantly dripped ... dripped ... dripped ... day and night. These drops of water constantly falling on the head finally became like the sound of hammer blows-and drove men insane. This same method of torture was used during the Spanish Inquisition and in German concentration camps under Hitler.

Worry is like the constant drip, drip, drip of water; and the constant drip, drip, drip of worry often drives men to insanity and suicide.

When I was a country lad in Missouri, I was half scared to death by listening to Billy Sunday describe the hell-fires of the next world. But he never ever mentioned the hell-fires of physical agony that worriers may have here and now. For example, if you are a

Chronic worrier, you may be stricken some day with one of the most excruciating pains ever endured by man: angina sectors.

Boy, if that ever hits you, you will scream with agony. Your screams will make the sounds in Dante's Inferno sound like Babes in Hoyland. You will say to yourself then: "Oh, God, oh, God, if I can ever get over this, I will never worry about anything-ever." (If you think I am exaggerating, ask your family physician.)

Do you love life? Do you want to live long and enjoy good health? Here is how you can do it. I am quoting Dr. Alexis Carrel again. He said: "Those who keep the peace of their inner selves in the midst of the tumult of the modern city are immune from nervous diseases."

Can you keep the peace of your inner self in the midst of the tumult of a modem city? If you are a normal person, the answer is "yes". "Emphatically yes." Most of us are stronger than we realize. We have inner resources that we have probably never tapped.

As Thoreau said in his immortal book, Walden:

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. ... If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

Surely, many of the readers of this book have as much will power and as many inner resources as Olga K. Harvey has. Her address is Box 892, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. She discovered that under the most tragic circumstances she could banish worry. I firmly believe that you and I can also-if we apply the old, old truths discussed in this volume. Here is Olga K. Harvey's story as she wrote it for me: "Eight and a half years ago, I was condemned to die-a slow, agonizing death-of cancer. The best medical brains of the country, the Mayo brothers, confirmed the sentence. I was at a dead-end street, the ultimate gaped at me! I was young. Furthermore, I did not want to die! In my desperation, I phoned to my doctor at Kellogg and cried out to him the despair in my heart. Rather impatiently he upbraided me: 'What's the matter, Olga, haven't you any fight in you? Sure, you will die if you keep on crying. Yes, the worst has overtaken you. O.K.-face the facts! Quit worrying 1 And then do something about it!' Right then and there I took an oath, an oath so solemn that the nails sank deep into my flesh and cold chills ran down my spine: 'I am not going to worry! I am not going to cry! And if there is anything to mind over matter, I am going to win! I am going to LIVE!'

"The usual amount of X-ray in such advanced cases, where they cannot apply radium, is 10 1/2 minutes a day for 30 days. They gave me X-ray for 14 1/2 minutes a day for 49 days; and although my bones stuck out of my emaciated body like rocks on a barren hillside, and although my feet were like lead, I did not worry! Not once did I cry! I smiled! Yes, I actually forced myself to smile.

"I am not so foolish as to imagine that merely smiling can cure cancer. But I do believe that a cheerful mental attitude helps the body fight disease. At any rate, I experienced one of the miracle cures of cancer. I have never been healthier than in the last few years, thanks to those challenging, fighting words of Dr. McCaffrey: 'Face the facts: Quite worrying; then do something about it!'"

I am going to close this chapter by repeating its title: the words of Dr. Alexis Carrel: "businessmen who do not know how to fight worry die young."

The fanatical followers of the prophet Mohammed often had verses from the Koran tattooed on their breasts. I would like to have the title of this chapter tattooed on the breast of every reader of this book: "businessmen who do not know how to fight worry die young."

Was Dr. Carrel speaking of you?

Could be.

Part One In A Nutshell

RULE 1: If you want to avoid worry, do what Sir William Osier did: Live in "day-tight compartments". Don't stew about the future. Just live each day until bedtime.

RULE 2: The next time Trouble-with a capital T- comes gunning for you and backs you up in a corner, try the magic formula of Willis H. Carrier:

a. Ask yourself, "What is the worst that can possibly happen if I can't solve my problem?"

b. Prepare yourself mentally to accept the worst-if necessary.

c. Then calmly try to improve upon the worst-which you have already mentally • agreed to accept.

RULE 3: Remind yourself of the exorbitant price you can pay for worry in terms of your health. "businessmen who do not know how to fight worry die young."

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 2

2025-05-31T08:58:00.000-07:00

A MAGIC FORMULA FOR SOLVING WORRY SITUATIONS

Would you like a quick, sure-fire recipe for handling worry situations-a technique you can start using right away, before you go any further in reading this book?

Then let me tell you about the method worked out by Willis H. Carrier, the brilliant engineer who launched the air-conditioning industry, and who is now head of the world-famous Carrier Corporation in Syracuse, New York. It is one of the best techniques I ever heard of for solving worry problems, and I got it from Mr. Carrier personally when we were having lunch together one day at the Engineers' Club in New York.

"When I was a young man," Mr. Carrier said, "I worked for the Buffalo Forge Company in Buffalo, New York. I was handed the assignment of installing a gas-cleaning device in a plant of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company at Crystal City, Missouri-a plant costing millions of dollars. The purpose of this installation was to remove the impurities from the gas so it could be burned without injuring the engines. This method of cleaning gas was new. It had been tried only once before- and under different conditions. In my work at Crystal City, Missouri, unforeseen difficulties arose. It worked after a fashion -but not well enough to meet the guarantee we had made.

"I was stunned by my failure. It was almost as if someone had struck me a blow on the head. My stomach, my insides, began to twist and turn. For a while I was so worried I couldn't sleep.

"Finally, common sense reminded me that worry wasn't getting me anywhere; so I figured out a way to handle my problem without worrying. It worked superbly. I have been using this same anti-worry technique for more than thirty years.

It is simple. Anyone can use it. It consists of three steps:

"Step I. I analyzed the situation fearlessly and honestly and figured out what was the worst that could possibly happen as a result of this failure. No one was going to jail me or shoot me. That was certain. True, there was a chance that I would lose my position; and there was also a chance that my employers would have to remove the machinery and lose the twenty thousand dollars we had invested.

"Step II. After figuring out what was the worst that could possibly happen, I reconciled myself to accepting it, if necessary. I said to myself: This failure will be a blow to my record, and it might mean the loss of my job; but if it does, I can always get another position. Conditions could be much worse; and as far as my employers are concerned-well, they realize that we are experimenting with a new method of cleaning gas, and if this experience costs them twenty thousand dollars, they can stand it. They can charge it up to research, for it is an experiment.

"After discovering the worst that could possibly happen and reconciling myself to accepting it, if necessary, an extremely important thing happened: I immediately relaxed and felt a sense of peace that I hadn't experienced in days.

"Step III. From that time on, I calmly devoted my time and energy to trying to improve upon the worst which I had already accepted mentally.

"I now tried to figure out ways and means by which I might reduce the loss of twenty thousand dollars that we faced. I made several tests and finally figured out that if we spent another five thousand for additional equipment, our problem would be solved. We did this, and instead of the firm losing twenty thousand, we made fifteen thousand.

"I probably would never have been able to do this if I had kept on worrying, because one of the worst features about worrying is that it destroys our ability to concentrate. When we worry, our minds jump here and there and everywhere, and we lose all power of decision. However, when we force ourselves to face the worst and accept it mentally, we then eliminate all those vague imaginings and put ourselves in a position in which we are able to concentrate on our problem.

"This incident that I have related occurred many years ago. It worked so superbly that I have been using it ever since; and, as a result, my life has been almost completely free from worry."

Now, why is Willis H. Carrier's magic formula so valuable and so practical, psychologically speaking? Because it yanks us down out of the great gray clouds in which we fumble around when we are blinded by worry. It plants our feet good and solid on the earth. We know where we stand. And if we haven't solid ground under us, how in creation can we ever hope to think anything through?

Professor William James, the father of applied psychology, has been dead for thirty-eight years. But if he were alive today, and could hear his formula for facing the worst, he would heartily approve it. How do I know that? Because he told his own students: "Be willing to have it so .... Be willing to have it so," he said, because "... Acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequences of any misfortune."

The same idea was expressed by Lin Yutong in his widely read book, The Importance of Living. "True peace of mind," said this Chinese philosopher, "comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think, it means a release of energy."

That's it, exactly! Psychologically, it means a new release of energy! When we have accepted the worst, we have nothing more to lose. And that automatically means-we have everything to gain! "After facing the worst," Willis H. Carrier reported, "I immediately relaxed and felt a sense of peace that I hadn't experienced in days. From that time on, I was able to think."

Makes sense, doesn't it? Yet millions of people have wrecked their lives in angry turmoil, because they refused to accept the worst; refused to try to improve upon it; refused to salvage what they could from the wreck. Instead of trying to reconstruct their fortunes, they engaged in a bitter and "violent contest with experience"-and ended up victims of that brooding fixation known as melancholia.

Would you like to see how someone else adopted Willis H. Carrier's magic formula and applied it to his own problem? Well, here is one example, from a New York oil dealer who was a student in my classes.

"I was being blackmailed!" this student began. "I didn't believe it was possible-I didn't believe it could happen outside the movies-but I was actually being blackmailed! What happened was this: the oil company of which I was the head had a number of delivery trucks and a number of drivers. At that time, OPA regulations were strictly in force, and we were rationed on the amount of oil we could deliver to any one of our customers. I didn't know it, but it seems that certain of our drivers had been delivering oil short to our regular customers, and then reselling the surplus to customers of their own.

"The first inkling I had of these illegitimate transactions was when a man who claimed to be a government inspector came to see me one day and demanded hush money. He had got documentary proof of what our drivers had been doing, and he threatened to turn this proof over to the District Attorney's office if I didn't cough up.

"I knew, of course, that I had nothing to worry about-personally, at least. But I also knew that the law says a firm is responsible for the actions of its employees. What's more, I knew that if the case came to court, and it was aired in the newspapers, the bad publicity would ruin my business. And I was proud of my business-it had been founded by my father twenty-four years before.

"I was so worried I was sick! I didn't eat or sleep for three days and nights. I kept going around in crazy circles. Should I pay the money-five thousand dollars-or should I tell this man to go ahead and do his damnedest? Either way I tried to make up my mind, it ended in nightmare.

"Then, on Sunday night, I happened to pick up the booklet on How to Stop Worrying which I had been given in my Carnegie class in public speaking. I started to read it, and came across the story of Willis H. Carrier. 'Face the worst', it said. So I asked myself: 'What is the worst that can happen if I refuse to pay up, and these blackmailers turn their records over to the District Attorney?'

"The answer to that was: The ruin of my business-that's the worst that can happen. I can't go to jail. All that can happen is that I shall be ruined by the publicity.'

"I then said to myself: 'All right, the business is ruined. I accept that mentally. What happens next?'

"Well, with my business ruined, I would probably have to look for a job. That wasn't bad. I knew a lot about oil-there were several firms that might be glad to employ me. ... I began to feel better. The blue funk I had been in for three days and nights began to lift a little. My emotions calmed down. ... And to my astonishment, I was able to think.

"I was clear-headed enough now to face Step III-improve on the worst. As I thought of solutions, an entirely new angle presented itself to me. If I told my attorney the whole situation, he might find a way out which I hadn't thought of. I know it sounds stupid to say that this hadn't even occurred to me before-but of course I hadn't been thinking, I had only been worrying! I immediately made up my mind that I would see my attorney first thing in the morning-and then I went to bed and slept like a log!

"How did it end? Well, the next morning my lawyer told me to go and see the District Attorney and tell him the truth. I did precisely that. When I finished I was astonished to hear the D.A. say that this blackmail racket had been going on for months and that the man who claimed to be a 'government agent' was a crook wanted by the police. What a relief to hear all this after I had tormented myself for three days and nights wondering whether I should hand over five thousand dollars to this professional swindler!

"This experience taught me a lasting lesson. Now, whenever I face a pressing problem that threatens to worry me, I give it what I call 'the old Willis H. Carrier formula'."

At just about the same time Willis H. Carrier was worrying over the gas-cleaning equipment he was installing in a plant in Crystal City, Missouri, a chap from Broken Bow, Nebraska, was making out his will. His name was Earl P. Haney, and he had duodenal ulcers. Three doctors, including a celebrated ulcer specialist, had pronounced Mr. Haney an "incurable case". They had told him not to eat this or that, and not to worry or fret-to keep perfectly calm. They also told him to make out his will!

These ulcers had already forced Earl P. Haney to give up a fine and highly paid position. So now he had nothing to do, nothing to look forward to except a lingering death.

Then he made a decision: a rare and superb decision. "Since I have only a little while to live," he said, "I may as well make the most of it. I have always wanted to travel around the world before I die. If I am ever going to do it, I'll have to do it now." So he bought his ticket.

The doctors were appalled. "We must warn you," they said to Mr. Haney, "that if you do take this trip, you will be buried at sea."

"No, I won't," he replied. "I have promised my relatives that I will be buried in the family plot at Broken Bow, Nebraska. So I am going to buy a casket and take it with me."

He purchased a casket, put it aboard ship, and then made arrangements with the steamship company-in the event of his death-to put his corpse in a freezing compartment and keep it there till the liner returned home. He set out on his trip, imbued with the spirit of old Omar:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and-sans End!

However, he didn't make the trip "sans wine". "I drank highballs, and smoked long cigars on that trip," Mr. Haney says in a letter that I have before me now. "I ate all kinds of foods-even strange native foods which were guaranteed to kill me. I enjoyed myself more than I had in years! We ran into monsoons and typhoons which should have put me in my casket, if only from fright-but I got an enormous kick out of all this adventure.

"I played games aboard the ship, sang songs, made new friends, stayed up half the night. When we reached China and India, I realized that the business troubles and cares that I had faced back home were paradise compared to the poverty and hunger in the Orient. I stopped all my senseless worrying and felt fine. When I got back to America, I had gained ninety pounds. I had almost forgotten I had ever had a stomach ulcer. I had never felt better in my life. Furthermore, I promptly sold the casket back to the undertaker, and went back to business. Furthermore, I haven't been ill a day since."

At the time this happened, Earl P. Haney had never even heard of Willis H. Carrier and his technique for handling worry. "But I realize now," he told me quite recently, "that I was unconsciously using the selfsame principle. I reconciled myself to the worst that could happen-in my case, dying. And then I improved upon it by trying to get the utmost enjoyment out of life for the time I had left. ... If," he continued, "if I had gone on worrying after boarding that ship, I have no doubt that I would have made the return voyage inside that coffin. But I relaxed-I forgot it. And this calmness of mind gave me a new birth of energy which actually saved my life." (Earl P. Haney is now living at 52 Wedge mere Ave., Winchester, Mass.)

Now, if Willis H. Carrier could save a twenty-thousand-dollar contract, if a New York businessman could save himself from blackmail, if Earl P. Haney could actually save his life, by using this magic formula, then isn't it possible that it may be the answer to some of your troubles? Isn't it possible that it may even solve some problems you thought were unsolvable?

So, Rule 2 is: If you have a worry problem, apply the magic formula of Willis H. Carrier by doing these three things-

1. Ask yourself,' 'What is the worst that can possibly happen?" 2. Prepare to accept it if you have to.

3. Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living, Chapter 1

2025-05-31T08:52:00.000-07:00

Part One - Fundamental Facts You Should Know About Worry

CHAPTER 1 - LIVE IN "DAY-TIGHT COMPARTMENTS"

In the spring of 1871, a young man picked up a book and read twenty-one words that had a profound effect on his future. A medical student at the Montreal General Hospital, he was worried about passing the final examination, worried about what to do, where to go, how to build up a practice, how to make a living.

The twenty-one words that this young medical student read in 1871 helped him to become the most famous physician of his generation. He organized the world-famous Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He became Region Professor of Medicine at Oxford-the highest honor that can be bestowed upon any medical man in the British Empire. Furthermore, he was knighted by the King of England. When he died, two huge volumes containing 1,466 pages were required to tell the story of his life.

His name was Sir William Osier. Here are the twenty-one words that he read in the spring of 1871-twenty-one words from Thomas Carlyle that helped him lead a life free from worry: "Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."

Forty-two years later, on a soft spring night when the tulips were blooming on the campus, this man, Sir William Osier, addressed the students of Yale University. He told those Yale students that a man like himself who had been a professor in four universities and had written a popular book was supposed to have "brains of a special quality". He declared that that was untrue. Furthermore, he said that his intimate friends knew that his brains were "of the most mediocre character".

What, then, was the secret of his success? He stated that it was owing to what he called living in "day-tight compartments." What did he mean by that? A few months before he spoke at Yale, Sir William Osier had crossed the Atlantic on a great ocean liner where the captain standing on the bridge, could press a button and-presto!-there was a clanging of machinery and various parts of the ship were immediately shut off from one another-shut off into watertight compartments. "Now each one of you," Dr. Osier said to those Yale students, "is a much more marvelous organization than the great liner, and bound on a longer voyage. What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with 'day-tight compartments' as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage. Get on the bridge, and see that at least the great bulkheads are in working order. Touch a button and hear, at every level of your life, the iron doors shutting out the Past-the dead yesterdays. Touch another and shut off, with a metal curtain, the Future -

The unborn tomorrows. Then you are safe-safe for today! ... Shut off the past! Let the dead past bury its dead. ... Shut out the yesterdays which have lighted fools the way to dusty death. ... The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past. ... The future is today. ... There is no tomorrow. The day of man's salvation is now. Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future. ... Shut close, then the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of life of 'day-tight compartments'."

Did Dr. Osier mean to say that we should not make any effort to prepare for tomorrow? No. Not at all. But he did go on in that address to say that the best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your enthusiasm, on doing today's work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.

Sir William Osier urged the students at Yale to begin the day with Christ's prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread."

Remember that that prayer asks only for today's bread. It doesn't complain about the stale bread we had to eat yesterday; and it doesn't say: "Oh, God, it has been pretty dry out in the wheat belt lately, and we may have another drought-and then how will I get bread to eat next autumn-or suppose I lose my job-oh, God, how could I get bread then?"

No, this prayer teaches us to ask for today's bread only. Today's bread is the only kind of bread you can possibly eat.

Years ago, a penniless philosopher was wandering through a stony country where the people had a hard time making a living. One day a crowd gathered about him on a hill, and he gave what is probably the most-quoted speech ever delivered anywhere at any time. This speech contains twenty-six words that have gone ringing down across the centuries: "Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Many men have rejected those words of Jesus: "Take no thought for the morrow." They have rejected those words as a counsel of perfection, as a bit of Oriental mysticism. "I must take thought for the morrow," they say. "I must take out insurance to protect my family. I must lay aside money for my old age. I must plan and prepare to get ahead."

Right! Of course, you must. The truth is that those words of Jesus, translated over three hundred years ago, don't mean today what they meant during the reign of King James. Three hundred years ago the word thought frequently meant anxiety. Modern versions of the Bible quote Jesus more accurately as saying: "Have no anxiety for the tomorrow."

By all means take thought for the tomorrow, yes, careful thought and planning and preparation. But have no anxiety.

During the war, our military leaders planned for the morrow, but they could not afford to have any anxiety. "I have supplied the best men with the best equipment we have," said Admiral Ernest J. King, who directed the United States Navy, "and have given them what seems to be the wisest mission. That is all I can do."

"If a ship has been sunk," Admiral King went on, "I can't bring it up. If it is going to be sunk, I can't stop it. I can use my time much better working on tomorrow's problem than by fretting about yesterday's. Besides, if I let those things get me, I wouldn't last long."

Whether in war or peace, the chief difference between good thinking and bad thinking is this: good thinking deals with causes and effects and leads to logical, constructive planning; bad thinking frequently leads to tension and nervous breakdowns.

I recently had the privilege of interviewing Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of one of the most famous newspapers in the world, The New York Times. Mr. Salzburger told me that when the Second World War flamed across Europe, he was so stunned, so worried about the future, that he found it almost impossible to sleep. He would frequently get out of bed in the middle of the night, take some canvas and tubes of paint, look in the mirror, and try to paint a portrait of himself. He didn't know anything about painting, but he painted anyway, to get his mind off his worries. Mr. Salzburger told me that he was never able to banish his worries and find peace until he had adopted as his motto five words from a church hymn: One step enough for me.

Lead, kindly Light ...

Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see

The distant scene; one step enough for me.

At about the same time, a young man in uniform-somewhere in Europe-was learning the same lesson. His name was Ted Bengermino, of 5716 Newsome Road, Baltimore, Maryland-and he had worried himself into a first-class case of combat fatigue.

"In April 1945," writes Ted Bengermino, "I had worried until I had developed what doctors call a 'spasmodic transverse colon'-a condition that produced intense pain. If the war hadn't ended when it did, I am sure I would have had a complete physical breakdown.

"I was utterly exhausted. I was a Graves Registration, Noncommissioned Officer for the 94th Infantry Division. My work was to help set up and maintain records of all men killed in action, missing in action, and hospitalized. I also had to help disinter the bodies of both Allied and enemy soldiers who had been killed and hastily buried in shallow graves during the pitch of battle. I had to gather the personal effects of these men and see that they were sent back to parents or closest relatives who would prize these personal effects so much. Furthermore, I was constantly worried about fear we might be making embarrassing and serious mistakes. Furthermore, I was worried about whether I would come through all this. Furthermore, I was worried about whether I would live to hold my only child in my arms-a son of sixteen months, whom I had never seen. Furthermore, I was so worried and exhausted that I lost thirty-four pounds. Furthermore, I was so frantic that I was almost out of my mind. Furthermore, I looked at my hands. They were hardly more than skin and bones. I was terrified at the thought of going home a physical wreck. I broke down and sobbed like a child. Furthermore, I was so shaken that tears welled up every time I was alone. There was one period soon after the Battle of the Bulge started that I wept so often that I almost gave up hope of ever being a normal human being again.

"I ended up in an Army dispensary. An Army doctor gave me some advice which has completely changed my life. After giving me a thorough physical examination, he informed me that my troubles were mental. 'Ted', he said, 'I want you to think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass. When we start in the morning, there are hundreds of tasks which we feel that we must accomplish that day, but if we do not take them one at a time and let them pass

Through the day slowly and evenly, as do the grains of sand passing through the narrow neck of the hourglass, then we are bound to break our own physical or mental structure.'

"I have practiced that philosophy ever since that memorable day that an Army doctor gave it to me. 'One grain of sand at a time. ... One task at a time.' That advice saved me physically and mentally during the war; and it has also helped me in my present position in business. I am a Stock Control Clerk for the Commercial Credit Company in Baltimore. I found the same problems arising in business that had arisen during the war: a score of things had to be done at once-and there was little time to do them. We were low in stocks. We had new forms to handle, new stock arrangements, changes of address, opening and closing offices, and so on. Instead of getting taut and nervous, I remembered what the doctor had told me. 'One grain of sand at a time. One task at a time.' By repeating those words to myself over and over, I accomplished my tasks in a more efficient manner and I did my work without the confused and jumbled feeling that had almost wrecked me on the battlefield."

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: "Have no anxiety about the morrow"; or the words of Sir William Osier: "Live in day-tight compartments."

You and I are standing this very second at the meeting-place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured forever, and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time. We can't possibly live in either of those eternities-no, not even for one split second. But, by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds. So let's be content to live the only time we can possibly live: from now until bedtime. "Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means."

Yes, that is all that life requires of us; but Mrs. E. K. Shields, 815, Court Street, Saginaw, Michigan, was driven to despair-even to the brink of suicide-before she learned to live just till bedtime. "In 1937, I lost my husband," Mrs. Shields said as she told me her story. "I was very depressed-and almost penniless. I wrote my former employer, Mr. Leon Roach, of the Roach-Fowler Company of Kansas City, and got my old job back. I had formerly made my living selling books to rural and town school boards. Furthermore, I had sold my car two years previously when my husband became ill; but I managed to scrape together enough money to put a down payment on a used car and started out to sell books again.

"I had thought that getting back on the road would help relieve my depression; but driving alone and eating alone was almost more than I could take. Some of the territory was not very productive, and I found it hard to make those car payments, small as they were.

"In the spring of 1938, I was working out from Versailles, Missouri. The schools were poor, the roads bad; I was so lonely and discouraged that at one time I even considered suicide. It seemed that success was impossible. I had nothing to live for. I dreaded getting up each morning and facing life. Furthermore, I was afraid of everything: afraid I could not meet the car payments; afraid I could not pay my room rent; afraid I would not have enough to eat. Furthermore, I was afraid my health was failing, and I had no money for a doctor. All

That kept me from suicide were the thoughts that my sister would be deeply grieved, and that I did not have enough money to pay my funeral expenses.

"Then one day I read an article that lifted me out of my despondence and gave me the courage to go on living. I shall never cease to be grateful for one inspiring sentence in that article. It said: 'Every day is a new life to a wise man.' I typed that sentence out and pasted it on the windshield of my car, where I saw it every minute I was driving. I found it wasn't so hard to live only one day at a time. Furthermore, I learned to forget the yesterdays and to not-think of the tomorrows. Each morning I said to myself: 'Today is a new life.'

"I have succeeded in overcoming my fear of loneliness, my fear of want. I am happy and fairly successful now and have a lot of enthusiasm and love for life. I know now that I shall never again be afraid, regardless of what life hands me. Furthermore, I know now that I don't have to fear the future. Furthermore, I know now that I can live one day at a time-and that 'Every day is a new life to a wise man.'"

Who do you suppose wrote this verse:

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He, who can call to-day his own:

He who, secure within, can say:

"To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have Liv'd to-day."

Those words sound modern, don't they? Yet they were written thirty years before Christ was born, by the Roman poet Horace.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

Why are we such fools-such tragic fools?

"How strange it is, our little procession of life I" wrote Stephen Peacock. "The child says: 'When I am a big boy.' But what is that? The big boy says: 'When I grow up.' And then, grown up, he says: 'When I get married.' But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to 'When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone. Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour."

The late Edward S. Evans of Detroit almost killed himself with worry before he learned that life "is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour." Brought up in poverty, Edward Evans made his first money by selling newspapers, then worked as a grocer's clerk. Later, with seven people dependent upon him for bread and butter, he got a job as an assistant librarian. Small as the pay was, he was afraid to quit. Eight years passed before he could summon up the courage to start out on his own. But once he started, he built up an original investment of fifty-five borrowed dollars into a business of his own that made him twenty thousand dollars a year. Then came a frost, a killing frost. He endorsed a big note for a friend-and the friend went bankrupt.

Quickly on top of that disaster came another: the bank in which he had all his money collapsed. He not only lost every cent he had, but was plunged into debt for sixteen thousand dollars. His nerves couldn't take it. "I couldn't sleep or eat," he told me. "I became strangely ill. Worry and nothing but worry," he said, "brought on this illness. One day as I was walking down the street, I fainted and fell on the sidewalk. I was no longer

Able to walk. I was put to bed and my body broke out in boils. These boils turned inward until just lying in bed was agony. I grew weaker every day. Finally, my doctor told me that I had only two more weeks to live. I was shocked. I drew up my will, and then lay back in bed to await my end. No use now to struggle or worry. I gave up, relaxed, and went to sleep. I hadn't slept two hours in succession for weeks; but now with my earthly problems drawing to an end, I slept like a baby. My exhausting weariness began to disappear. My appetite returned. I gained weight.

"A few weeks later, I was able to walk with crutches. Six weeks later, I was able to go back to work. I had been making twenty thousand dollars a year; but I was glad now to get a job for thirty dollars a week. I got a job selling blocks to put behind the wheels of automobiles when they are shipped by freight. Furthermore, I had learned my lesson now. No more worry about me-no more regret about what had happened in the past-no more dread of the future. I concentrated all my time, energy, and enthusiasm into selling those blocks."

Edward S. Evans shot up fast now. In a few years, he was president of the company. His company-the Evans Product Company-has been listed on the New York Stock Exchange for years. When Edward S. Evans died in 1945, he was one of the most progressive businessmen in the United States. If you ever fly over Greenland, you may land on Evans Field- a flying-field named in his honor.

Here is the point of the story: Edward S. Evans would never have had the thrill of achieving these victories in business and in living if he hadn't seen the folly of worrying-if he hadn't learned to live in day-tight compartments.

Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that "everything changes except the law of change". He said: "You cannot step in the same river twice." The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?

The old Romans had a word for it. In fact, they had two words for it. Carpe diem. "Enjoy the day." Or, "Seize the day." Yes, seize the day, and make the most of it.

That is the philosophy of Lowell Thomas. I recently spent a weekend at his farm; and I noticed that he had these words from Psalm XVIII framed and hanging on the walls of his broadcasting studio where he would see them often:

This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

John Ruskin had on his desk a simple piece of stone on which was carved one word: TODAY. And while I haven't a piece of stone on my desk, I do have a poem pasted on my mirror where I can see it when I shave every morning-a poem that Sir William Osier always kept on his desk-a poem written by the famous Indian dramatist, Alias:

Salutation To The Dawn

Look to this day!

For it is life, the very life of life.

In its brief course

Lie all the verities and realities of your existence: The bliss of growth

The glory of action

The splendor of achievement.

For yesterday is but a dream

And tomorrow is only a vision,

But today well lived makes yesterday a dream of happiness And every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well, therefore, to this day!

Such is the salutation to the dawn.

So, the first thing you should know about worry is this: if you want to keep it out of your life, do what Sir William Osier did -

1. Shut the iron doors on the past and the future. Live in Day-tight Compartments

Why not ask yourself these questions, and write down the answers?

1. Do I tend to put off living in the present in order to worry about the future, or to yearn for some "magical rose garden over the horizon"?

2. Do I sometimes embitter the present by regretting things that happened in the past-that are over and done with?

3. Do I get up in the morning determined to "Seize the day"-to get the utmost out of these twenty-four hours?

4. Can I get more out of life by "living in day-tight compartments" ?

5. When shall I start to do this? Next week? . Tomorrow? ... Today?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How to Stop Worrying & Start Living (Preface)

2025-05-18T19:02:00.000-07:00

How This Book Was Written—and Why

Thirty-five years ago, I was one of the unhappiest young men in New York. I made my living selling motor trucks, yet I didn’t know—or even care—how they worked. I despised my job. I despised living in a dingy, cockroach-infested room on West 56th Street, where I’d reach for a necktie in the morning only to watch the roaches scatter. I loathed eating in cheap, grimy restaurants that likely harbored the same pests.

Every night, I returned to my lonely room with a throbbing headache—a headache fueled by disappointment, worry, bitterness, and rebellion. My college dreams had curdled into nightmares. *Was this life?* Was this the "vital adventure" I’d eagerly anticipated? Trapped in a job I hated, surrounded by filth, with no future in sight—while my hunger to read and write, the passions I’d nurtured in college, went unfulfilled?

I realized I had nothing to lose by quitting. I didn’t crave wealth—I craved *living*. So I reached my Rubicon, the decisive moment most young people face, and chose a path that transformed the next 35 years into a journey beyond my wildest hopes.

Here’s what I decided: I’d abandon the work I loathed. Having trained as a teacher at Missouri’s State Teachers’ College, I’d teach night classes for adults. That would free my days to read, prepare lectures, and write. I wanted to *"live to write and write to live."*

But what subject? Reflecting on my education, I saw that public speaking had been more practical than all my other studies combined. It erased my timidity, gave me confidence, and proved that leadership favors those who can articulate their ideas.

I applied to teach public speaking at Columbia and NYU—but they rejected me. At the time, I was crushed. Now, I thank God for it. Instead, I taught at YMCA night schools, where I had to deliver *immediate* results. These students weren’t chasing credits; they wanted to conquer fears. Salesmen sought courage to face tough clients. Others yearned for poise to speak up in meetings. They paid in installments—and stopped if they saw no progress. My pay? A cut of the profits. No results meant no dinner.

What seemed a handicap became priceless training. I had to motivate, solve problems, and make every session electrifying. To my astonishment, these men flourished—gaining promotions, raises, and confidence. Within three years, the YMCA, which once refused me $5 a night, paid $30.

Over time, I noticed another crippling problem: worry. My students—executives, engineers, housewives—were drowning in it. I scoured libraries for a textbook on conquering worry, only to find 22 books on the subject… and 189 on worms. Absurd! With worry plaguing humanity, why didn’t schools teach how to overcome it?

So I resolved to write my own. For seven years, I devoured philosophy, biographies (from Confucius to Churchill), and interviewed luminaries like Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Ford. But the real lab was my classroom. Students tested anti-worry rules and reported back. I’ve heard more "How I Beat Worry" stories than anyone alive.

This book isn’t theory—it’s a battle-tested manual. The stories are real (names and addresses included). As the French philosopher Valery said, "Science is a collection of successful recipes." These recipes aren’t new; the challenge is applying them.

You didn’t pick this up for a writing lesson. You want action. So read the first 44 pages. If they don’t leave you feeling empowered, toss this book. It’s not for you.

—Dale Carnegie

Atomic Habits Chapter 20

2025-05-16T19:46:00.000-07:00

The Downside of Creating Good Habits

Habits create the foundation for mastery. In chess, only after the basic movements of the pieces become automatic can a player focus on the next level of the game. Each chunk of memorized information frees up mental space for more effortful thinking. This principle applies to any endeavor. Once simple actions are so ingrained that they require no thought, you can direct your attention to advanced details. In this way, habits are the backbone of excellence.

However, the benefits of habits come at a cost. Initially, repetition builds fluency, speed, and skill. But as a habit becomes automatic, you grow less sensitive to feedback. You slip into mindless repetition, allowing mistakes to go unnoticed. When you can perform "well enough" on autopilot, you stop thinking about improvement.

The upside of habits is that they let us act without thinking. The downside is that we become accustomed to doing things a certain way and overlook small errors. You might assume experience means improvement, but in reality, you’re merely reinforcing existing habits—not refining them. Research even shows that once a skill is mastered, performance often declines slightly over time.

For most everyday habits—brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, making tea—this minor decline doesn’t matter. "Good enough" is truly good enough. Freeing up mental energy for what’s important is the real value of automation.

But if you aim for elite performance, you need a more deliberate approach. Repeating the same actions blindly won’t lead to exceptional results. Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is automatic habits combined with deliberate practice.

Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery

Certain skills must become automatic before higher-level mastery is possible. Basketball players must dribble without thought before mastering off-hand layups. Surgeons must perform initial incisions flawlessly before handling complex variables. But after mastering one habit, you must return to the effortful work of building the next.

Mastery is a cycle: narrow your focus, repeat until the skill is internalized, then use that habit as a foundation for the next challenge. Old tasks become easier, but improvement demands new effort. Each habit unlocks a higher level of performance—an endless progression.

The danger lies in complacency. Just as a skill starts to feel automatic—just as you grow comfortable—you must resist the urge to stop refining it.

The solution?A system for reflection and review.

HOW TO REVIEW YOUR HABITS AND MAKE ADJUSTMENTS

In 1986, the Los Angeles Lakers had one of the most talented basketball teams ever assembled, but they are rarely remembered that way. The team started the 1985–1986 NBA season with an astounding 29–5 record. "The pundits were saying that we might be the best team in the history of basketball," head coach Pat Riley said after the season. Surprisingly, the Lakers stumbled in the 1986 playoffs and suffered a season-ending defeat in the Western Conference Finals. The "best team in the history of basketball" didn't even play for the NBA championship.

After that blow, Riley was tired of hearing about how much talent his players had and about how much promise his team held. He didn't want to see flashes of brilliance followed by a gradual fade in performance. He wanted the Lakers to play up to their potential, night after night. In the summer of 1986, he created a plan to do exactly that, a system that he called the Career Best Effort program or CBE.

"When players first join the Lakers," Riley explained, "we track their basketball statistics all the way back to high school. I call this Taking Their Number. We look for an accurate gauge of what a player can do, then build him into our plan for the team, based on the notion that he will maintain and then improve upon his averages."

After determining a player's baseline level of performance, Riley added a key step. He asked each player to "improve their output by at least 1 percent over the course of the season. If they succeeded, it would be a CBE, or Career Best Effort." Similar to the British Cycling team that we discussed in Chapter 1, the Lakers sought peak performance by getting slightly better each day.

Riley was careful to point out that CBE was not merely about points or statistics but about giving your "best effort spiritually and mentally and physically." Players got credit for "allowing an opponent to run into you when you know that a foul will be called against him, diving for loose balls, going after rebounds whether you are likely to get them or not, helping a teammate when the player he's guarding has surged past him, and other 'unsung hero' deeds."

As an example, let's say that Magic Johnson—the Lakers star player at the time—had 11 points, 8 rebounds, 12 assists, 2 steals, and 5 turnovers in a game. Magic also got credit for an "unsung hero" deed by diving after a loose ball (+1). Finally, he played a total of 33 minutes in this imaginary game.

The positive numbers (11 + 8 + 12 + 2 + 1) add up to 34. Then, we subtract the 5 turnovers (34–5) to get 29. Finally, we divide 29 by 33 minutes played.

29/33 = 0.879

Magic's CBE number here would be 879. This number was calculated for all of a player's games, and it was the average CBE that a player was asked to improve by 1 percent over the season. Riley compared each player's current CBE to not only their past performances but also those of other players in the league. As Riley put it, "We rank team members alongside league opponents who play the same position and have similar role definitions."

Sportswriter Jackie MacMullan noted, "Riley trumpeted the top performers in the league in bold lettering on the blackboard each week and measured them against the corresponding players on his own roster. Solid, reliable players generally rated a score in the 600s, while elite players scored at least 800. Magic Johnson, who submitted 138 triple-doubles in his career, often scored over 1,000."

The Lakers also emphasized year-over-year progress by making historical comparisons of CBE data. Riley said, "We stacked the month of November 1986, next to November 1985, and showed the players whether they were doing better or worse than at the same point last season. Then we showed them how their performance figures for December 1986, stacked up against November's."

The Lakers rolled out CBE in October 1986. Eight months later, they were NBA champions. The following year, Pat Riley led his team to another title as the Lakers became the first team in twenty years to win back-to-back NBA championships. Afterward, he said, "Sustaining an effort is the most important thing for any enterprise. The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time."

The CBE program is a prime example of the power of reflection and review. The Lakers were already talented. CBE helped them get the most out of what they had, and made sure their habits improved rather than declined.

Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement. Without reflection, we can make excuses, create rationalizations, and lie to ourselves. We have no process for determining whether we are performing better or worse compared to yesterday.

Top performers in all fields engage in various types of reflection and review, and the process doesn't have to be complex. Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge is one of the greatest marathoners of all time and an Olympic gold medalist. He still takes notes after every practice in which he reviews his training for the day and searches for areas that can be improved. Similarly, gold medal swimmer Katie Ledecky records her wellness on a scale of 1 to 10 and includes notes on her nutrition and how well she slept. She also records the times posted by other swimmers. At the end of each week, her coach goes over her notes and adds his thoughts.

It's not just athletes, either. When comedian Chris Rock is preparing fresh material, he will first appear at small nightclubs dozens of times and test hundreds of jokes. He brings a notepad on stage and records which bits go over well and where he needs to make adjustments. The few killer lines that survive will form the backbone of his new show.

I know of executives and investors who keep a "decision journal" in which they record the major decisions they make each week, why they made them, and what they expect the outcome to be. They review their choices at the end of each month or year to see where they were correct and where they went wrong.

Improvement is not just about learning habits, it's also about fine-tuning them. Reflection and review ensures that you spend your time on the right things and make course corrections whenever necessary—like Pat Riley adjusting the effort of his players on a nightly basis. You don't want to keep practicing a habit if it becomes ineffective.

Personally, I employ two primary modes of reflection and review. Each December, I perform an Annual Review, in which I reflect on the previous year. I tally my habits for the year by counting up how many articles I published, how many workouts I put in, how many new places I visited, and more. Then, I reflect on my progress (or lack thereof) by answering three questions:

1. What went well this year?

2. What didn't go so well this year?

3. What did I learn?

Six months later, when summer rolls around, I conduct an Integrity Report. Like everyone, I make a lot of mistakes. My Integrity Report helps me realize where I went wrong and motivates me to get back on course. I use it as a time to revisit my core values and consider whether I have been living in accordance with them. This is when I reflect on my identity and how I can work toward being the type of person I wish to become.

My yearly Integrity Report answers three questions:

1. What are the core values that drive my life and work?

2. How am I living and working with integrity right now?

3. How can I set a higher standard in the future?

These two reports don't take very long—just a few hours per year—but they are crucial periods of refinement. They prevent the gradual slide that happens when I don't pay close attention. They provide an annual reminder to revisit my desired identity and consider how my habits are helping me become the type of person I wish to be. They indicate when I should upgrade my habits and take on new challenges and when I should dial my efforts back and focus on the fundamentals.

Reflection can also bring a sense of perspective. Daily habits are powerful because of how they compound, but worrying too much about every daily choice is like looking at yourself in the mirror from an inch away. You can see every imperfection and lose sight of the bigger picture. There is too much feedback. Conversely, never reviewing your habits is like never looking in the mirror. You aren't aware of easily fixable flaws—a spot on your shirt, a bit of food in your teeth. There is too little feedback. Periodic reflection and review is like viewing yourself in the mirror from a conversational distance. You can see the important changes you should make without losing sight of the bigger picture. You want to view the entire mountain range, not obsess over each peak and valley.

Finally, reflection and review offers an ideal time to revisit one of the most important aspects of behavior change: identity.

HOW TO BREAK THE BELIEFS THAT HOLD YOU BACK

In the beginning, repeating a habit is essential to build evidence of your desired identity. But once you've adopted that new identity, those same beliefs can prevent further growth. When working against you, your identity creates a kind of pride that makes you deny weaknesses and blocks real progress. This is one of the biggest downsides of habit formation.

The more sacred an idea is to us - the more deeply tied to our identity - the more fiercely we defend it against criticism. We see this everywhere:

• The teacher who sticks to outdated methods

• The manager insisting on doing things "his way"

• The surgeon dismissing younger colleagues' ideas

• The band stuck recreating their first hit

The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder growth becomes.

The solution? Keep your identity flexible. As investor Paul Graham advises, "keep your identity small." When any single belief defines you completely, you lose adaptability. Consider:

• The athlete who can't adjust after retirement

• The veteran struggling with civilian life

• The CEO lost after selling their company

• The vegan facing necessary dietary changes

The key is to define yourself by flexible qualities rather than rigid roles:

"I'm an athlete" → "I'm mentally tough and love challenges"

"I'm a soldier" → "I'm disciplined and reliable"

"I'm a CEO" → "I build and create things"

This approach mirrors wisdom from the Tao Te Ching:

"Men are born soft and supple;

dead, they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant;

dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail."

Habits bring many benefits but can trap us in outdated patterns. Since everything changes, we must regularly examine whether our habits and beliefs still serve us.

Lack of self-awareness is dangerous. Regular reflection is the cure.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

• Habits automate behavior (good) but can blind us to errors (bad)

• Mastery requires both habits and deliberate practice

• Reflection helps maintain awareness of your progress

• Rigid identities limit growth; flexible ones enable it

The strongest identities are those that can adapt while maintaining core values. Like water flowing around obstacles, they work with change rather than against it.

Atomic Habits Chapter 19

2025-05-16T17:19:00.000-07:00

The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

In 1955, Disneyland had just opened in Anaheim, California, when a ten-year-old boy walked in and asked for a job. Labor laws were loose back then, and the boy managed to land a position selling guidebooks for $0.50 apiece.

Within a year, he had transitioned to Disney’s magic shop, where he learned tricks from the older employees. He experimented with jokes and tried out simple routines on visitors. Soon, he discovered that what he loved was not performing magic but performing in general. He set his sights on becoming a comedian.

Beginning in his teenage years, he started performing in small clubs around Los Angeles. The crowds were sparse, and his act was short—rarely more than five minutes. Most people in the audience were too busy drinking or chatting with friends to pay attention. One night, he even delivered his stand-up routine to an empty club.

It wasn’t glamorous work, but there was no doubt he was improving. His earliest routines lasted only a minute or two. By high school, he had expanded his material to a five-minute act, and a few years later, to a ten-minute show. At nineteen, he was performing weekly for twenty minutes at a time—sometimes padding his set with three poems just to fill the time. Yet, his skills kept growing.

He spent another decade experimenting, adjusting, and practicing. He took a job as a television writer and gradually landed his own appearances on talk shows. By the mid-1970s, he had become a regular guest on The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.

Finally, after nearly fifteen years of work, the young man rose to fame. He toured sixty cities in sixty-three days, then seventy-two cities in eighty days, and later eighty-five cities in ninety days. In Ohio, 18,695 people attended a single show. In New York, 45,000 tickets sold for his three-day run. He catapulted to the top of his craft, becoming one of the most successful comedians of his time.

His name? Steve Martin.

Martin’s story offers a fascinating perspective on what it takes to stick with habits for the long run. Comedy is not for the timid. It’s hard to imagine a more nerve-wracking scenario than performing alone on stage and failing to get a single laugh. Yet, Martin faced this fear weekly for eighteen years. As he put it: “10 years spent learning, 4 years spent refining, and 4 years as a wild success.”

Why do some people, like Martin, stick with their habits—whether practicing jokes, drawing cartoons, or playing guitar—while most of us struggle to stay motivated? How do we design habits that pull us in rather than fade away? Scientists have studied this question for years, and while much remains to be learned, one consistent finding is this: The key to sustained motivation and peak desire is working on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.”

The human brain loves a challenge—but only if it’s within an optimal zone of difficulty. If you love tennis and play against a four-year-old, you’ll quickly get bored. It’s too easy; you’ll win every point. Conversely, if you face a pro like Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you’ll lose motivation because the match is impossibly hard.

But what if you play someone at your own level? You win some points, lose others. You have a real chance of winning—but only if you push yourself. Your focus sharpens, distractions fade, and you become fully immersed in the game. This is the challenge of “just manageable difficulty”—and the essence of the Goldilocks Rule.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

The Goldilocks Rule

Steve Martin's comedy career is a perfect example of the Goldilocks Rule in action. Each year, he expanded his routine but only by a minute or two. He introduced new material while keeping a few reliable jokes that guaranteed laughs. There were just enough victories to keep him motivated and just enough challenges to push him forward.

When starting a new habit, it's crucial to keep the behavior easy so you can stick with it even when conditions aren't ideal. But once a habit is established, you must progress in small, manageable steps. These incremental improvements and new challenges keep you engaged. And when you hit the Goldilocks Zone - the sweet spot between too easy and too hard - you can achieve a flow state.

The Science of Flow

A flow state is the experience of being "in the zone," fully immersed in an activity. Research suggests that to achieve flow, a task must be roughly 4% beyond your current ability. While it's not always practical to measure difficulty so precisely, the core idea remains: Working on challenges at the edge of your skills keeps motivation alive.

Improvement requires balance. You must seek challenges that stretch your limits while still making enough progress to stay motivated. Habits must remain novel to stay satisfying - without variety, we grow bored. And boredom is the enemy of long-term success.

How to Stay Focused When You Get Bored Working on Your Goals

After my baseball career ended, I took up weightlifting. One day, an elite coach - who had trained Olympians - visited our gym. I asked him:

"What separates the best athletes from everyone else?"

He mentioned genetics, luck, and talent - but then said something unexpected:

"At some point, it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over."

This was a different perspective on work ethic. Many believe success comes from passion or unshakable motivation. But the truth? Even the most successful people struggle with boredom. The difference? They show up anyway.

The Boredom Barrier

Mastery requires repetition - but repetition breeds boredom. Once the initial excitement fades, motivation wanes. You hit the gym a few days in a row, publish a couple of blog posts, and think, "One missed day won't hurt."

The greatest threat to success isn't failure - it's boredom. When habits become predictable, we seek novelty. We jump from one workout plan to another, one diet to the next, endlessly chasing the next "perfect" strategy. As Machiavelli observed:

"Men desire novelty so much that those doing well crave change as much as those doing poorly."

This explains why habit-forming products thrive on novelty:

- Video games provide visual surprises.

- Social media offers unpredictable rewards.

- Junk food delivers endless flavor variations.

In psychology, this is called variable rewards - the most potent example being slot machines. The unpredictability of wins spikes dopamine, making habits stick.

But variable rewards alone don't create motivation - they amplify existing cravings. The ideal balance? A 50/50 split between success and failure. Half the time you win; half the time you're left wanting more. This balance sustains engagement, which is why the Goldilocks Rule works so well.

When Consistency Trumps Novelty

Not all habits can (or should) rely on unpredictability. If Google only worked half the time, or Uber showed up sporadically, we'd abandon them. The same goes for flossing - if it only sometimes cleaned your teeth, you'd quit.

No habit stays exciting forever. Sooner or later, you face the real test: falling in love with boredom.

Everyone has goals, but if you only work when motivated, you'll never achieve mastery. There will always be days when:

- You don't feel like writing.

- You want to skip the gym.

- You'd rather relax than work on your craft.

What separates professionals from amateurs?

- Professionals stick to the schedule. Amateurs wait for inspiration.

- Professionals prioritize what matters. Amateurs get derailed by distractions.

As meditation teacher David Cain says:

"Don't be a fair-weather meditator."

The same applies to any discipline. True commitment means showing up even when it's tedious.

I've never regretted finishing a workout, publishing on schedule, or pushing through resistance. Excellence comes from doing the work - especially when it's boring.

Chapter Summary

- The Goldilocks Rule: Peak motivation happens when tasks are just beyond your current ability.

- Boredom > Failure: The real threat to success isn't failing - it's losing interest.

- Routine Kills Motivation: Habits become less satisfying over time.

- Consistency Wins: Professionals work regardless of motivation; amateurs wait for perfect conditions.

- Fall in Love with Boredom: The path to mastery is repetition, not constant excitement.

Atomic Habits Chapter 18

2025-05-16T01:43:00.000-07:00

The Truth About Talent: When Genes Matter and When They Don’t

Many people are familiar with Michael Phelps, who is widely considered one of the greatest athletes in history. Phelps has won more Olympic medals than any swimmer — more than any Olympian in any sport. Fewer people know the name Hicham El Guerrouj, but he is a remarkable athlete in his own right. El Guerrouj is a Moroccan runner who holds two Olympic gold medals and is regarded as one of the greatest middle-distance runners of all time. For many years, he held the world records for the mile, 1,500-meter, and 2,000-meter races. At the Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, in 2004, he won gold in both the 1,500-meter and 5,000-meter races.

These two athletes are strikingly different in various ways. (For starters, one competes on land while the other competes in water.) Most notably, they differ significantly in height: El Guerrouj is five feet, nine inches tall, whereas Phelps stands six feet, four inches tall. Despite this seven-inch difference, Phelps and El Guerrouj share one commonality: they wear the same length inseam on their pants.

How is this possible? Phelps has relatively short legs for his height and a very long torso, which is ideal for swimming. In contrast, El Guerrouj possesses long legs and a shorter upper body, perfect for distance running.

Now, imagine if these world-class athletes were to switch sports. Could Michael Phelps, given his remarkable athleticism, become an Olympic-caliber distance runner with enough training? It’s unlikely. At peak fitness, Phelps weighed 194 pounds, which is 40 percent heavier than El Guerrouj, who competed at an ultralight 138 pounds. Taller runners are generally heavier, and every extra pound is a disadvantage in distance running. Against elite competition, Phelps would likely struggle from the outset.

Conversely, while El Guerrouj might be one of the best runners in history, it’s doubtful he would ever qualify for the Olympics as a swimmer. Since 1976, the average height of Olympic gold medalists in the men’s 1,500-meter run is five feet, ten inches. In comparison, the average height of Olympic gold medalists in the men’s 100-meter freestyle swim is six feet, four inches. Swimmers tend to be taller and have longer backs and arms, which are ideal for moving through water. El Guerrouj would be at a severe disadvantage in the swimming pool.

The key to maximizing your chances of success is to choose the right field of competition. This principle applies not only in sports, but also in habit formation and business. Habits that align with our natural inclinations and abilities are easier to adopt and more satisfying to maintain. Like Michael Phelps in the pool or Hicham El Guerrouj on the track, you want to play a game where the odds are in your favor.

Embracing this strategy requires acknowledging the simple truth that people are born with different abilities. Some may find this uncomfortable to discuss. Although our genes seem fixed on the surface, it’s not enjoyable to confront aspects of life that are beyond our control. Phrases like "biological determinism" can give the impression that some individuals are destined for success while others are doomed to failure. However, this perspective is shortsighted when it comes to understanding the role of genetics in behavior.

The strength of genetics is also their limitation. While genes cannot be easily changed, they offer a significant advantage under favorable circumstances and present a serious disadvantage in unfavorable ones. For instance, being seven feet tall is beneficial for dunking a basketball but a considerable hindrance in gymnastics. Our environment determines how suitable our genes are and the utility of our natural talents. When our environment changes, so too do the qualities that dictate success.

This principle applies not only to physical characteristics but also to mental ones. I may have expertise in habits and human behavior but be less knowledgeable about knitting, rocket propulsion, or guitar chords. Competence heavily relies on context.

Individuals at the top of any competitive field are not only well-trained but also well-suited to their tasks. Therefore, if you aspire to be truly great, selecting the right area to focus on is crucial.

In summary, genes do not dictate your destiny; they only define your areas of opportunity. As physician Gabor Mate notes, “Genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine.” The areas where you are genetically predisposed to succeed are the ones where habits are more likely to be enjoyable. The essential strategy is to direct your efforts toward pursuits that excite you and align with your natural skills, bridging your ambition with your abilities.

The obvious question arises: “How do I identify where the odds are in my favor? How do I discover the opportunities and habits that are right for me?” The first step in finding answers is to understand your personality.

How Your Personality Influences Your Habits

Your genes operate beneath the surface of every habit, influencing everything from the hours you spend watching television to your likelihood of marriage or divorce, and even your susceptibility to addiction. There is a strong genetic component to how obedient or rebellious you are in the face of authority, how resilient or vulnerable you are to stress, how proactive or reactive you tend to be, and even how captivated or bored you feel during sensory experiences like a concert. As Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at King’s College in London, stated, “It is now at the point where we have stopped testing to see if traits have a genetic component because we literally can’t find a single one that isn’t influenced by our genes.”

Your unique cluster of genetic traits predisposes you to a particular personality. Personality comprises characteristics that remain consistent across various situations. The most scientifically validated analysis of personality traits is known as the “Big Five,” which breaks them down into five spectrums of behavior:

1. **Openness to Experience:** Ranging from curious and inventive to cautious and consistent.

2. **Conscientiousness:** From organized and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous.

3. **Extroversion:** From outgoing and energetic to solitary and reserved (commonly referred to as extroverts versus introverts).

4. **Agreeableness:** From friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached.

5. **Neuroticism:** From anxious and sensitive to confident, calm, and stable.

All five characteristics have biological foundations. For example, extroversion can be traced from birth. Researchers have observed that some babies turn toward loud noises while others turn away. Tracking these children into adulthood revealed that those who turned toward the noise were more likely to grow into extroverts, while those who turned away were more likely to become introverts.

Individuals high in agreeableness are kind, considerate, and warm-hearted. They also tend to have higher natural oxytocin levels, a hormone that plays a crucial role in social bonding, increases trust, and can serve as a natural antidepressant. It’s easy to imagine how someone with elevated oxytocin levels might be inclined to develop habits like writing thank-you notes or organizing social events.

As a third example, consider neuroticism, a trait present in varying degrees among all people. Those with high neuroticism levels tend to be more anxious and worry more than others. This trait has been linked to hypersensitivity of the amygdala, the brain's region responsible for recognizing threats. In essence, individuals who are more sensitive to negative cues in their environment are likely to score higher in neuroticism.

While our habits are not solely determined by our personalities, it's clear that our genes influence our inclinations. Our ingrained preferences make certain behaviors easier for some individuals than for others. You shouldn’t apologize for these differences or feel guilty about them; instead, you should work with them. For instance, a person who has a lower conscientiousness score may struggle with orderliness and may need to utilize environmental design more strategically to establish good habits.

The takeaway is that you should cultivate habits that align with your personality. You can achieve remarkable results by engaging in exercises that interest you. If a friend adheres to a low-carb diet but you find more success with a low-fat approach, follow what works for you. If your preference is for engaging romance novels over nonfiction, read what captivates you.

You don’t have to conform to someone else’s idea of what constitutes a good habit. There is a version of every habit that can bring you joy and satisfaction — find it. Habits must be enjoyable if they are to stick, which is the core idea behind the 4th Law.

Tailoring your habits to fit your personality is a great starting point, but it is only the beginning. Let’s now focus on identifying and designing situations where you have a natural advantage.

How to Find a Game Where the Odds Are in Your Favor

Learning to play a game where the odds are in your favor is critical for maintaining motivation and achieving success. In theory, you can enjoy almost anything. In practice, however, you are more likely to enjoy activities that come easily to you. People who excel in a specific area tend to be more competent at that task and receive praise for their efforts. This positive feedback keeps them energized as they make progress where others struggle. Additionally, their success often leads to better pay and greater opportunities, which not only enhances their happiness but also motivates them to produce even higher-quality work. It creates a virtuous cycle.

Selecting the right habit can make progress easy, whereas choosing the wrong habit may lead to constant struggle. So, how do you pick the right habit? The first step, as discussed in the 3rd Law, is to **make it easy**. Often, when people choose the wrong habit, it is simply too challenging. When a habit is easy, you're more likely to succeed, and success in turn fosters satisfaction. However, there’s another layer to consider. Over time, as you continue to advance and improve, any area can become challenging. Thus, you need to ensure you're playing the right game for your skill set.

So, how do you identify that game? The most common method is trial and error. However, there’s a problem with this approach: life is short. You don’t have the time to try every career, date every eligible partner, or play every musical instrument. Fortunately, there is an effective strategy to manage this dilemma, known as the **explore/exploit trade-off**.

At the beginning of a new activity, a period of exploration is essential. In relationships, this phase is often called dating. In college, it can be seen in a liberal arts education. In business, it’s akin to split testing. The goal is to try various options, research a broad range of ideas, and cast a wide net. After this initial exploration, you should narrow your focus to the most promising option you've found while still allowing for the occasional experiment.

The right balance between exploring and exploiting depends on your current outcomes. If you are currently winning, maximize your efforts; if you are losing, continue exploring. Generally, it's most effective to commit to a strategy that yields the best results about 80 to 90 percent of the time, allowing for exploration in the remaining 10 to 20 percent. Google famously encourages its employees to spend 80 percent of their workweek on official tasks and 20 percent on projects of their choice, which has led to innovative products like AdWords and Gmail.

Your approach should also take into account how much time you have. If you're early in your career and have ample time, it’s wise to explore. Once you find the right path, you still have plenty of time to capitalize on it. Conversely, if you're nearing a deadline, you should implement the best solution you've discovered so far to deliver results.

As you explore different options, consider asking yourself a series of questions to help narrow in on the habits and areas that will be most fulfilling for you:

1. What feels like fun to me but work to others?

The key indicator of whether you're suited for a task is not whether you enjoy it but rather whether you can endure its challenges more easily than most. When are you enjoying yourself while others are complaining? The work that feels less burdensome to you than to others is likely your true calling.

2. What makes me lose track of time?

Flow is the mental state achieved when you are so engrossed in a task that the world around you fades away. This combination of happiness and peak performance, often experienced by athletes and performers in their “zone,” indicates that the activity is at least somewhat satisfying.

3. Where do I achieve greater returns than the average person?

We tend to compare ourselves to those around us, and behaviors are often more satisfying when the comparison favors us. For instance, when I started writing at JamesClear.com, my email list grew rapidly. Although I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing right, I recognized that my results were coming faster than those of some colleagues, motivating me to continue writing.

4. What comes naturally to me?

Temporarily set aside what you’ve been taught, societal expectations, and others’ opinions. Reflect inwardly and ask, “What feels natural to me? When have I felt truly alive? When have I felt like my authentic self?” Avoid internal judgments or people-pleasing. Just focus on feelings of engagement and enjoyment. Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are likely headed in the right direction.

To be candid, some aspects of this process involve luck. Just as Michael Phelps and Hicham El Guerrouj were fortunate to be born with rare abilities valued by society and placed in ideal environments, we all have limited time on this planet. The truly remarkable among us not only work hard but also seize the opportunities that align with our skills.

But what if you don’t want to leave your fate to chance?

If you can’t find a game where the odds are stacked in your favor, create one. Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind *Dilbert*, observes, “Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average stand-up comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. When you add in my business background, suddenly I have a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.”

When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the competition, making it easier to stand out. You can bypass the need for a genetic advantage or extensive experience by rewriting the rules. A skilled player works hard within the existing game, while a great player creates a new game that plays to their strengths and minimizes their weaknesses.

For instance, while in college, I designed my own major in biomechanics, integrating physics, chemistry, biology, and anatomy. I wasn’t smart enough to stand out among top physics or biology majors, so I created my own niche. Because it suited my interests, studying felt less like a chore, and it was easier to avoid comparing myself to others. After all, no one else was taking the same combination of classes, so there was no basis for comparison.

Specialization is a powerful way to overcome the limitations of genetics. The more you master a specific skill, the harder it becomes for others to compete with you. For example, many bodybuilders may be stronger than the average arm wrestler, but even a massive bodybuilder can lose an arm wrestling match to a champion who has honed specific strengths. Even if you’re not the most naturally gifted, you often have the opportunity to excel in a narrow domain.

Just as boiling water softens a potato but hardens an egg, you can’t control whether you’re a potato or an egg. However, you can choose to play a game where it’s beneficial to be hard or soft. By finding a more favorable environment, you can transform a situation where the odds seem against you into one where they are in your favor.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Genes

Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work; rather, they clarify it. They indicate what we should focus our efforts on. Once we recognize our strengths, we can better allocate our time and energy. We’ll know which opportunities to pursue and which challenges to avoid. The more we understand our nature, the more effective our strategies become.

Biological differences matter, but it’s more productive to concentrate on fulfilling your own potential rather than comparing yourself to someone else. The fact that there may be natural limits to a specific ability doesn't affect whether you are nearing the ceiling of your capabilities. People often become so preoccupied with their perceived limitations that they forget to exert the effort required to approach those limits.

Moreover, genes won’t guarantee success if you’re not putting in the necessary work. Yes, it’s possible that the toned trainer at the gym has better genes, but unless you’re putting in the same effort, you can’t determine if you've been dealt a better or worse genetic hand. Until you work as hard as those you admire, don't attribute their success solely to luck.

In summary, one of the best ways to ensure your habits remain satisfying in the long run is to engage in behaviors that align with your personality and skills. Focus on working hard in areas where you naturally excel.

Chapter Summary

- The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.

- Pick the right habit, and progress will be easier. Choose the wrong habit, and life can become a struggle.

- Genes are not easily changed, so they provide a significant advantage in favorable circumstances and a serious disadvantage in unfavorable ones.

- Habits are easier to maintain when they align with your natural abilities.

- Choose habits that best suit you.

- Play a game that favors your strengths. If you can’t find a game that does, create one.

- Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work; they clarify what you should focus on.

"Congratulations! In today’s fast-scrolling world, most people can’t focus long enough to finish a video filled with real knowledge. But if you’ve made it this far, it means you have something rare—focus, patience, and a true hunger for wisdom.

Remember, summaries are only half the story. True knowledge lies in full understanding. So if you're someone who values deep, effortless learning—through complete books and powerful ideas—subscribe now and continue your journey with us.
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Atomic Habits Chapter 17

2025-05-15T06:00:00.000-07:00

How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

After serving as a pilot in World War II, Roger Fisher attended Harvard Law School and dedicated thirty-four years to specializing in negotiation and conflict management. He founded the Harvard Negotiation Project and collaborated with various countries and world leaders on peace resolutions, hostage crises, and diplomatic compromises. However, it was during the 1970s and 1980s, amid escalating nuclear war threats, that Fisher developed one of his most thought-provoking ideas.

At that time, Fisher focused on strategies to prevent nuclear war and noted a troubling reality: any sitting president had access to launch codes capable of killing millions but would never witness the consequences firsthand, as he would always be thousands of miles away. Fisher proposed a radical solution: "Put that [nuclear] code number in a little capsule and implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry a butcher knife and accompany the President. If the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, he would first have to kill someone with his own hands. He has to look at someone and face the reality of innocent death.”

Fisher's suggestion shocked many. Friends in the Pentagon responded, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.” This proposal serves as an inversion of the 4th Law of Behavior Change: rather than making good habits rewarding, it proposes making bad habits immediately painful.

Just as we are more likely to repeat an experience when the ending is satisfying, we are also more inclined to avoid experiences that end in pain. Pain serves as an effective teacher. If a failure is painful, it gets fixed; if it is relatively painless, it often goes unaddressed. Immediate consequences can prompt rapid learning. For instance, the threat of a bad review compels a plumber to perform well, while the risk of losing customers drives restaurants to produce quality food. The more severe the potential consequences, the quicker the learning process.

We tend to repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, making them challenging to abandon. One effective strategy for overcoming this is to increase the immediacy of the punishment linked to that behavior. When actions carry immediate consequences, behavior begins to change. Customers pay their bills on time when charged a late fee, while students show up to class when attendance is tied to their grades. People often go to great lengths to avoid immediate pain.

However, it’s essential that the strength of the punishment matches the behavior it seeks to correct. For instance, the cost of procrastination must outweigh the cost of action, and the price of laziness must be greater than the cost of exercise. The imposition of fines for smoking in restaurants or not recycling adds tangible consequences to actions. Behavior only shifts when the punishment is adequately painful and consistently enforced.

In general, the more local, tangible, and immediate the consequence, the more likely it is to influence individual behavior. Conversely, the more vague and delayed the consequence, the less influence it has. Thankfully, there is a straightforward way to incorporate an immediate cost into any bad habit: create a habit contract.

The Habit Contract

The first seat belt law was passed in New York on December 1, 1984. At that time, only 14 percent of people in the United States regularly wore seat belts, but that was about to change. Within five years, over half the nation adopted seat belt laws. Nowadays, wearing a seat belt is enforceable by law in forty-nine of the fifty states.

It’s not just the legislation that changed behaviors; the number of people wearing seat belts has dramatically increased. By 2016, over 88 percent of Americans buckled up every time they got in a car, demonstrating a significant reversal in the habits of millions. Laws and regulations are examples of how governments can alter our habits through social contracts. As a society, we collectively agree to certain rules that are enforced collectively. Whenever legislation affects behavior—like seat belt laws, smoking bans in restaurants, or mandatory recycling—it exemplifies a social contract shaping habits. The group agrees to act in a specific way, and punishment ensues for those who do not comply.

Just as governments utilize laws to hold citizens accountable, you can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable as well. A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement where you commit to a specific habit and outline the punishment for failing to follow through. To enhance your commitment, involve one or two accountability partners who will sign off on the contract with you.

Bryan Harris, an entrepreneur from Nashville, Tennessee, was one of the first individuals I encountered using this strategy. Shortly after the birth of his son, Harris wanted to lose some weight. He drafted a habit contract that included his wife and personal trainer. The contract stated, “Bryan’s #1 objective for Q1 of 2017 is to start eating correctly so he feels better, looks better, and aims to achieve a long-term goal of 200 pounds at 10% body fat.”

Harris then mapped out a roadmap to achieve his ideal outcome, detailing phases for each quarter and daily habits that would contribute to his goal. He also established consequences for failure: if he missed his daily food logging or failed to weigh himself, he would have to dress up for work every day and pay his trainer $200.

Initially, I thought that such a formal contract seemed excessive, especially with the signatures. However, Harris explained that signing the contract signified seriousness and commitment, stating, “Anytime I skip this part, I start slacking almost immediately.”

Three months later, having met his targets for Q1, Harris escalated his goals andthe consequences. Missing specified targets had him paying $100 to his trainer, and a failure to weigh in meant $500 to his wife. The most challenging consequence? If he forgot to run sprints, he had to dress up for work each day and wear a hat representing his rival college football team, a bitter pill for the loyal Auburn fan.

The strategy proved effective. With his wife and trainer serving as accountability partners, and the contract clarifying daily expectations, Harris successfully lost weight.

To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to introduce immediate pain. Crafting a habit contract is a straightforward approach to achieving that.

Even if you’re not inclined to create an extensive habit contract, having an accountability partner can be immensely beneficial. Comedian Margaret Cho, for instance, engages in a daily "song a day" challenge with a friend, helping them both stay accountable. The knowledge that someone is watching can serve as a powerful motivator. You are less likely to procrastinate or give up because there’s an immediate cost involved. It’s no longer just your personal commitment on the line; it impacts how you’re viewed by others.

You can even automate this accountability process. Entrepreneur Thomas Frank wakes up at 5:55 each morning, and if he doesn’t, he has a tweet scheduled that states, “It’s 6:10 and I’m not up because I’m lazy! Reply to this for $5 via PayPal (limit 5), assuming my alarm didn’t malfunction.”

We consistently strive to present our best selves to the world. We dress well, maintain good hygiene, and pursue respectable grades because we desire positive feedback. The opinions of those around us matter deeply. This need for approval is precisely why having an accountability partner or signing a habit contract can be so effective.

Chapter Summary

The inversion of the 4th Law of Behavior Change is to make it unsatisfying.

We are less likely to repeat a bad habit if it is painful or unsatisfying. An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction.

We care about others' opinions and don’t want to be perceived negatively.

A habit contract can be employed to impose a social cost on any behavior, making the consequences of neglecting your commitments public and painful.

Remember, summaries are only half the story. True knowledge lies in full understanding. So if you're someone who values deep, effortless learning—through complete books and powerful ideas—subscribe now and continue your journey with us.

Let’s grow, one full Chapter at a time."

Atomic Habits Chapter 16

2025-05-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

In 1993, a bank in Abbotsford, Canada, hired a twenty-three-year-old stockbroker named Trent Dyrsmid. Abbotsford was a relatively small suburb, tucked away in the shadow of nearby Vancouver, where most big business deals transpired. Given the location and the fact that Dyrsmid was a rookie, expectations were low. However, he made quick progress thanks to a simple daily habit.

Each morning, Dyrsmid set two jars on his desk: one filled with 120 paper clips and the other empty. As soon as he settled in for the day, he would make a sales call and then move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty one. This repeatable process continued until all paper clips had transferred to the second jar. "Every morning, I would start with 120 paper clips in one jar, and I would keep dialing the phone until I had moved them all to the second jar," he explained.

Within eighteen months, Dyrsmid was generating $5 million for the firm. By age twenty-four, he earned $75,000 annually—the equivalent of $125,000 today. Soon after, he secured a six-figure position with another company.

I like to refer to Dyrsmid's technique as the Paper Clip Strategy. Over the years, I've heard from readers who have adapted this method in various ways. One woman shifted a hairpin from one container to another whenever she wrote a page of her book. Another man moved a marble from one bin to the next after completing a set of push-ups.

Making progress is inherently satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips, hairpins, or marbles—provide clear evidence of achievement. This method reinforces behavior and adds immediate satisfaction to any activity. Visual measurement can take various forms: food journals, workout logs, loyalty punch cards, progress bars on software downloads, or even the page numbers in a book. However, perhaps the most effective way to track your progress is with a habit tracker.

How to Keep Your Habits on Track

A habit tracker is a straightforward tool to measure whether you completed a habit. The simplest format is a calendar where you cross off each day you stick to your routine. For instance, if you meditate on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you mark those dates with an "X." As time passes, your calendar becomes a record of your habit streak.

Many people have successfully tracked their habits, but perhaps the most famous example is Benjamin Franklin. Starting at age twenty, Franklin carried a small booklet to record progress on thirteen personal virtues, which included goals like “Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful” and “Avoid trifling conversation.” At the end of each day, Franklin reviewed his booklet to assess his progress.

Additionally, comedian Jerry Seinfeld reportedly uses a habit tracker to maintain his streak of writing jokes. In the documentary *Comedian*, he states that his goal is simply to "never break the chain" of daily writing. He focuses on consistently showing up and adding to his streak rather than fixating on the quality of each joke.

The mantra “Don’t break the chain” is a powerful one. Not breaking the chain of sales calls helps you build a successful book of business, while consistent workouts lead to quicker fitness gains. Similarly, by creating daily work, you’ll compile an impressive portfolio. Habit tracking is effective because it utilizes multiple Laws of Behavior Change, making a behavior obvious, attractive, and satisfying.

Benefits of Habit Tracking

Benefit #1: Habit tracking is obvious.

Recording your last action creates a trigger that can prompt your next action. Habit tracking naturally builds a series of visual cues, like streaks of "X's" on your calendar or entries in your food log. When you view your calendar and see your streak, it reminds you to take action again. Research has shown that individuals who track their progress on goals like weight loss, smoking cessation, and blood pressure reduction are more likely to succeed than those who do not. One study revealed that people who kept daily food logs lost twice as much weight as those who did not track their intake. The simple act of tracking can spark the urge to change.

Habit tracking also keeps you accountable. Most of us have a distorted view of our behavior, believing we act better than we do. Measurement offers a way to overcome this blindness and recognize daily realities. A glance at the paper clips in your jar provides immediate insight into how much effort you've truly put in. When evidence is in front of you, you're less likely to deceive yourself.

Benefit #2: Habit tracking is attractive.

The most effective motivation comes from making progress. When we receive signals that we are moving forward, our motivation to continue strengthens. Habit tracking can create an addictive effect on motivation. Each small win feeds your drive, especially on challenging days. When you feel down, it's easy to overlook your past successes. Habit tracking offers visual proof of your hard work—a subtle reminder of how far you've come. Additionally, an empty square each morning can motivate you to get started to avoid losing your progress by breaking the streak.

Benefit #3: Habit tracking is satisfying.

This might be the most crucial benefit. Tracking itself can become a rewarding experience. It's gratifying to cross an item off your to-do list, complete an entry in your workout log, or mark an "X" on your calendar. Watching your results grow—whether in investment portfolios or book manuscripts—can create a sense of accomplishment, and if it feels good, you're likely to persist.

Habit tracking also helps maintain focus on the process rather than the outcome. Instead of obsessing over achieving six-pack abs, you concentrate on keeping the streak alive and becoming the kind of person who doesn't skip workouts.

In summary, habit tracking offers several benefits:

1. It creates visual cues that remind you to act.

2. It motivates you by allowing you to see your progress and avoid losing it.

3. It provides satisfaction whenever you record another successful instance of your habit.

Moreover, habit tracking delivers tangible proof that you are actively working toward becoming the person you desire, fostering immediate and intrinsic gratification.

You might wonder why I've waited so long to discuss habit tracking if it's so useful.

The truth is many people resist tracking and measuring. It can feel burdensome because it requires you to adopt both the habit you want to build and the habit of tracking. Counting calories can seem overwhelming when you're already struggling with a diet. Writing down every sales call can feel tedious when you have work to do. It’s tempting to say, “I’ll just eat less” or “I’ll try harder” or “I’ll remember to do it.” Many people tell me things like, “I have a decision journal, but I wish I used it more,” or “I tracked my workouts for a week, but then I quit.” I've experienced this myself. I once made a food log to track calories and managed to keep it up for only one meal before giving up.

Tracking isn’t necessary for everyone, and it is not essential to measure every aspect of your life. However, nearly anyone can benefit from it in some form—even if only temporarily.

Making Tracking Easier

What can we do to simplify the tracking process?

First, whenever possible, measurement should be automated. You might be surprised by how much tracking you're already doing without realizing it. For example, your credit card statement tracks how often you dine out, while your Fitbit records steps and sleep duration. Your calendar can show how many new places you visit each year. Once you know where to find this data, schedule a note in your calendar to review it weekly or monthly. This approach is often more practical than daily tracking.

Second, limit manual tracking to your most important habits. It’s better to consistently track one habit than to sporadically track several.

Finally, record your measurements immediately after performing the habit. The completion of the behavior can serve as your cue to write it down. This technique allows you to combine the habit-stacking method with habit tracking.

The habit stacking + habit tracking formula can look like this:

- After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT].

- After I hang up the phone from a sales call, I will move one paperclip over.

- After I finish each set at the gym, I will record it in my workout journal.

- After I put my plate in the dishwasher, I will write down what I ate.

These strategies can simplify the habit tracking process. Even if you don't typically enjoy recording your behavior, a few weeks of measurements can be enlightening. It can reveal how you're truly spending your time.

That said, every habit streak eventually ends. More important than any single measurement is having a solid plan for when your habits veer off track.

How to Recover Quickly When Your Habits Break Down

No matter how consistent you are, life will inevitably disrupt your habits at some point. Perfection is unattainable. Soon enough, unforeseen circumstances—like illness, work travel, or family obligations—will arise.

When faced with these interruptions, I remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice. If I miss one day, I aim to get back on track as quickly as possible. Missing one workout is acceptable, but I won’t allow myself to miss two in a row. I might indulge in an entire pizza, but I will make sure to follow it with a healthy meal. While perfection isn't my goal, avoiding a second lapse is key. As soon as one streak ends, I begin another.

The first mistake you make is often not the one that derails you; it’s the pattern of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the beginning of a new habit—potentially a bad one.

This principle distinguishes winners from losers. Anyone can experience a poor performance, a bad workout, or a rough day at work. However, successful individuals rebound quickly when they falter. The breakdown of a habit is inconsequential if you reclaim it swiftly.

I believe this principle is so vital that I’ll adhere to it even if my attempts aren't as robust as I would like. All too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing mindset regarding our habits. The problem lies not in slipping up, but in thinking that if we can’t do something perfectly, we shouldn’t attempt it at all.

You may not realize the significance of simply showing up on your bad or busy days. Missing days can hurt you more than having successful days can help. If you start with $100, a 50 percent gain would increase your capital to $150, but a mere 33 percent loss would take you back to $100. Therefore, avoiding a 33 percent loss is as valuable as achieving that 50 percent gain. As Charlie Munger once stated, “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.”

This is why “bad” workouts often hold the most importance. Sluggish days and poor workouts help maintain the compounded gains accrued from previous good days. Just doing something—whether it's ten squats, five sprints, or a single push-up—is significant. Don't let a zero day happen. Avoiding losses is crucial to sustaining your emotional and physical momentum.

Additionally, it’s not solely about what occurs during the workout. It’s about cultivating the identity of someone who doesn’t miss workouts. It’s easy to train when you feel good, but the true test of your commitment emerges when you don’t feel like it—even if you accomplish less than you hoped. Spending just five minutes at the gym may not enhance your performance, but it reinforces your identity.

The all-or-nothing cycle of behavior change is just one trap that can derail your habits. Another potential pitfall—especially when using a habit tracker—is the risk of measuring the wrong things.

KNOWING WHEN (AND WHEN NOT) TO TRACK A HABIT

Imagine you're running a restaurant and want to evaluate your chef's performance. One approach could be tracking the number of customers who pay for a meal each day. If more customers enter, it suggests that the food must be good. Conversely, fewer customers might imply something is wrong.

However, relying solely on this one measurement—daily revenue—offers a limited view of what's truly happening. Just because someone pays for a meal doesn't guarantee their enjoyment of it. Even dissatisfied customers are unlikely to dine and dash; they might simply not return. If you're only measuring revenue, the quality of the food could be declining while your marketing strategies or discounts mask the issue. Instead, it might be more effective to track how many customers finish their meals or the percentage of those who leave generous tips.

The downside of focusing on a single behavior is that we might become overly driven by the numbers, losing sight of the purpose behind them. If your success is measured by quarterly earnings, you could optimize for sales and revenue while neglecting the broader purpose of your business. Similarly, if your goal is to achieve a lower number on the scale, you might resort to crash diets, juice cleanses, or fat-loss pills. The human mind desires to "win" at whatever game is being played.

This pitfall is prevalent in many aspects of life. For instance, we often focus on working long hours instead of accomplishing meaningful work. We may prioritize achieving ten thousand steps rather than focusing on overall health. In education, we sometimes teach to standardized tests rather than fostering learning, curiosity, and critical thinking. In essence, we optimize for what we measure, leading to adverse behavioral outcomes when we select inappropriate metrics.

This phenomenon is encapsulated by Goodhart’s Law, named after economist Charles Goodhart. The principle states, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Measurement is only valuable when it informs you, providing context and clarity, rather than consuming all of your focus. Each number represents just one piece of feedback within a larger system.

In today’s data-driven world, we often overvalue quantifiable metrics while undervaluing qualities that are ephemeral, soft, and difficult to measure. We erroneously assume that measurable factors are the only things that matter. Just because you can quantify something doesn’t imply it’s the most important aspect, nor does the inability to measure something mean it lacks significance.

Thus, it's essential to maintain habit tracking in its appropriate context. While it can be satisfying to record a habit and monitor your progress, measurement should not be the sole focus. Moreover, there are various ways to measure progress, and sometimes it’s beneficial to shift your attention to different aspects entirely.

This is why nonscale victories can be effective for weight loss. The number on the scale might be stubborn, causing motivation to wane if you focus solely on that figure. However, you might notice improvements in your skin, better sleep patterns, or a boost in your sex drive. These are all valid indicators of progress. If the scale doesn't lift your spirits, it may be time to concentrate on alternative measurements that resonate with your journey.

Regardless of how you choose to track your progress, habit tracking offers a straightforward method to enhance your habits. Each measurement provides evidence that you're moving in the right direction, accompanied by a brief moment of immediate satisfaction for a job well done.

Chapter Summary

- One of the most satisfying feelings is making progress.

- A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you accomplished a habit—like marking an "X" on a calendar.

- Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can enhance your habits by providing clear evidence of progress.

- Aim to "not break the chain." Try to keep your habit streak alive.

- Remember to "never miss twice." If you miss one day, strive to get back on track as soon as possible.

- Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important factor.

Atomic Habits Chapter 15

2025-05-13T20:26:00.000-07:00

The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change

In the late 1990s, a public health worker named Stephen Luby left his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, and bought a one-way ticket to Karachi, Pakistan.

Karachi was one of the most populous cities in the world. By 1998 over nine million people it home. It was the economic center of Pakistan and a transportation hub, featuring some of the most active airports and seaports in the region. In the commercial parts of town, you could find standard urban amenities amidst bustling downtown streets. However, Karachi was also one of the least livable cities in the world.

Over 60 percent of Karachi’s residents lived in squatter settlements and slums. These densely packed neighborhoods were filled with makeshift houses cobbled together from old boards, cinder blocks, and other discarded materials. There was no waste removal system, no electricity grid, and no clean water supply. When dry, the streets were a mix of dust and trash; when wet, they became muddy pits of sewage. Mosquito colonies thrived in pools of stagnant water, and children played among the garbage.

The unsanitary conditions led to widespread illness and disease. Contaminated water sources caused epidemics of diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Nearly one-third of the children living there were malnourished. With so many people crammed into such a small space, viruses and bacterial infections spread rapidly. It was this public health crisis that had brought Stephen Luby to Pakistan.

Luby and his team realized that in an environment with poor sanitation, the simple habit of washing hands could make a significant difference in the residents' health. However, they soon discovered that many people were already aware of the importance of handwashing. Yet, despite this knowledge, many residents washed their hands in a haphazard fashion. Some individuals would quickly run their hands under water; others would wash only one hand. Many would simply forget to wash their hands before preparing food. Everyone acknowledged that handwashing was important, but few made it a habit. The issue wasn’t knowledge—it was consistency.

That’s when Luby and his team partnered with Procter & Gamble to supply the neighborhood with Safeguard soap. Compared to standard bars of soap, using Safeguard was a more enjoyable experience. “In Pakistan, Safeguard was a premium soap,” Luby recalled. “The study participants commonly mentioned how much they liked it.” The soap lathered easily and smelled great, making handwashing slightly more pleasurable.

“I see the goal of handwashing promotion not as behavior change but as habit adoption,” Luby said. “It is much easier for people to adopt a product that provides a strong positive sensory signal, such as the mint taste of toothpaste, than to adopt a habit that does not provide pleasurable sensory feedback, like flossing one's teeth. The marketing team at Procter & Gamble aimed to create a positive handwashing experience.”

Within months, the researchers observed a rapid improvement in the health of the children in the neighborhood. The rate of diarrhea fell by 52 percent; pneumonia rates decreased by 48 percent; and impetigo, a bacterial skin infection, diminished by 35 percent.

The long-term effects were even more promising. “We returned to some of the households in Karachi six years later,” Luby told me. “Over 95 percent of households that had been given the soap for free and encouraged to wash their hands had a handwashing station with soap and water available during our visit. We hadn't provided any soap to the intervention group for over five years, but they had become so habituated to washing their hands that they maintained the practice.” This was a powerful example of the fourth and final Law of Behavior Change: make it satisfying.

We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. This is entirely logical. Feelings of pleasure—even minor ones like washing your hands with soap that smells nice and lathers well—signal to the brain: “This feels good. Do this again next time.” Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating.

Take the story of chewing gum. Chewing gum was sold commercially throughout the 1800s, but it wasn’t until Wrigley launched in 1891 that it became a worldwide habit. Early versions were made from relatively bland resins—chewy, but not tasty. Wrigley revolutionized the industry by adding flavors like Spearmint and Juicy Fruit, making the product flavorful and fun to use. They went a step further and began promoting chewing gum as a pathway to a clean mouth, with advertisements urging readers to “Refresh Your Taste.” Tasty flavors and the feeling of a fresh mouth provided immediate reinforcement, making the product satisfying to use. Consumption skyrocketed, and Wrigley became the largest chewing gum company in the world.

Toothpaste followed a similar trajectory. Manufacturers achieved great success by adding flavors like spearmint, peppermint, and cinnamon to their products. These flavors don’t improve the effectiveness of toothpaste; they simply create a “clean mouth” sensation and make the experience of brushing teeth more pleasurable. My wife actually stopped using Sensodyne because she didn’t like the aftertaste and switched to a brand with a stronger mint flavor, which she found more satisfying.

Conversely, if an experience is not satisfying, we have little reason to repeat it. In my research, I encountered the story of a woman who had a narcissistic relative who drove her crazy. In an attempt to spend less time with this egomaniac, she acted as dull and boring as possible whenever he was around. Within a few encounters, he started avoiding her due to her uninteresting demeanor.

Stories like these illustrate the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided. You learn what to do in the future based on what you were rewarded for doing (or punished for doing) in the past. Positive emotions cultivate habits, while negative emotions destroy them.

The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time, completing the habit loop.

However, there is a trick: we are not looking for just any type of satisfaction; we are seeking immediate satisfaction.

The Mismatch Between Immediate and Delayed Rewards

Imagine you’re an animal roaming the plains of Africa—a giraffe, an elephant, or a lion. On any given day, most of your decisions have immediate impacts. You are always focused on basic needs: what to eat, where to sleep, and how to avoid predators. You live in what scientists call an immediate-return environment, where actions deliver clear, immediate outcomes.

Now switch back to your human self. In modern society, many of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. If you perform well at work, you receive a paycheck in a few weeks. If you exercise today, you may not notice a difference until you’re healthier next year. If you save money now, you might have enough for retirement decades later. You live in what scientists refer to as a delayed-return environment, where actions often take years before delivering their intended benefits.

The human brain did not evolve for life in a delayed-return environment. The earliest remains of modern humans, known as *Homo sapiens sapiens*, are approximately two hundred thousand years old. These were the first humans to possess a brain similar to ours, particularly the neocortex—the newest part of the brain responsible for higher functions like language—which was roughly the same size two hundred thousand years ago as it is today. You are carrying around the same hardware as your Paleolithic ancestors.

Only recently—over the past five hundred years—has society shifted to a predominantly delayed-return environment. Compared to the age of the brain, modern society is brand new. In the last one hundred years alone, we’ve witnessed the rise of the automobile, the airplane, the television, the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone, and even pop culture icons like Beyoncé. While the world has transformed dramatically, human nature has changed little.

Similar to other animals on the African savannah, our ancestors spent their days responding to immediate threats, securing their next meal, and seeking shelter from storms. It made sense for them to place a high value on instant gratification, as the distant future was less of a concern. After thousands of generations in an immediate-return environment, our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs over long-term ones.

Behavioral economists refer to this tendency as time inconsistency. In other words, the way your brain evaluates rewards is inconsistent over time. You tend to value the present more than the future. While this tendency typically serves us well, it occasionally leads to problems.

Why would someone smoke even though they know it increases the risk of lung cancer? Why would someone overeat despite knowing the risks of obesity? Why would someone engage in unsafe sex despite the potential consequences of sexually transmitted diseases? Once you understand how the brain prioritizes rewards, the answers become clear: the consequences of bad habits are delayed, while the rewards are immediate. Smoking might kill you in ten years, but it reduces stress and satisfies nicotine cravings now. Overeating is harmful in the long run but feels great in the moment. Sex—safe or unsafe—provides immediate pleasure, while the repercussions of disease and infection often won’t manifest for days, weeks, or even years.

Every habit produces multiple outcomes over time. Unfortunately, these outcomes are often misaligned. With our bad habits, the immediate outcome usually feels good while the ultimate outcome feels bad. With good habits, the reverse is true: the immediate outcome is unenjoyable, but the ultimate outcome feels good. The French economist Frédéric Bastiat accurately described this dilemma: “It almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. . . . Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits.”

Put differently, the costs of your good habits are experienced in the present, while the costs of your bad habits manifest in the future.

The brain’s tendency to prioritize the present moment means you can’t rely solely on good intentions. When you create a plan—to lose weight, write a book, or learn a language—you are essentially making plans for your future self. Visualizing your desired future makes it easy to appreciate the importance of taking actions with long-term benefits. We all aspire to improve our lives; however, when moments of decision arrive, instant gratification often prevails. You are no longer making choices for Future You, who dreams of being fitter, wealthier, or happier. Instead, you are choosing for Present You, who seeks comfort, indulgence, and entertainment. As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you gain from an action, the more critically you should evaluate whether it aligns with your long-term goals.

With a clearer understanding of what leads our brains to repeat some behaviors and avoid others, let’s refine the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.

Our penchant for instant gratification reveals an essential truth about success: because of our inherent wiring, most people will spend their day chasing quick hits of satisfaction. The path less traveled is the one of delayed gratification. If you are willing to wait for the rewards, you will face less competition and often achieve larger payoffs. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.

This is precisely what research has shown. Individuals who are better at delaying gratification tend to have higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, a reduced likelihood of obesity, better stress management, and superior social skills. We have all seen this play out in our own lives. If you resist the temptation to watch television and prioritize completing your homework, you are likely to learn more and achieve better grades. If you avoid buying desserts and chips at the grocery store, you often end up eating healthier at home. Ultimately, success in nearly every field requires you to overlook immediate rewards in favor of delayed ones.

Here lies the challenge: most people know that delaying gratification is the wise approach. They desire the benefits of good habits—such as being healthy, productive, and at peace. However, these outcomes often fade from view at crucial decision-making moments. Fortunately, it is possible to train yourself to delay gratification, but you must work with human nature rather than against it. The best strategy is to add a bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that yield long-term rewards and introduce a bit of immediate pain to those that do not.

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HOW TO TURN INSTANT GRATIFICATION TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

The key to making a habit stick is to feel successful—even in small ways. Success is a signal that your habit has paid off and that the effort was worth it.

In a perfect world, the reward for a good habit would be the habit itself. However, in the real world, good habits often feel worthwhile only after they have provided you with tangible benefits. At the outset, it’s all about sacrifice. You’ve gone to the gym a few times, but you don’t yet feel stronger, fitter, or faster—at least not noticeably. It’s only after months of consistent effort, as you shed a few pounds or notice definition in your arms, that exercising for its own sake becomes easier. Initially, you need a reason to stay on track, which is why immediate rewards are essential. They keep you motivated while the delayed rewards accumulate in the background.

What we’re really discussing here—when talking about immediate rewards—is the conclusion of a behavior. The ending of any experience is crucial because we tend to remember it more than other phases. You want the conclusion of your habit to be satisfying. The best approach is to utilize reinforcement, which refers to using an immediate reward to increase the likelihood of a behavior. Habit stacking, which we covered in Chapter 5, ties your habit to an immediate cue, making it obvious when to start. Reinforcement connects your habit to an immediate reward, making it satisfying when you complete it.

Immediate reinforcement can be particularly helpful when dealing with habits of avoidance, which are behaviors you want to stop. It can be challenging to stick with habits like “no frivolous purchases” or “no alcohol this month” because nothing happens when you skip happy hour drinks or refrain from buying that pair of shoes. It can feel unsatisfying to avoid temptation, as there isn’t much reward in simply resisting.

One solution is to turn the situation on its head. Make avoidance visible. Open a savings account and label it for something you want—perhaps “Leather Jacket.” Whenever you pass on a purchase, deposit the same amount of money into the account. Decided to skip your morning latte? Transfer $5. Passed on another month of Netflix? Move $10 over. It’s like creating a loyalty program for yourself; the immediate reward of watching your savings grow feels much better than the sensation of deprivation. You make it satisfying to do nothing.

One of my readers and his wife employed a similar strategy. They wanted to cut down on dining out and start cooking together more. They labeled their savings account “Trip to Europe.” Whenever they opted to skip going out to eat, they transferred $50 into the account. At the end of the year, they used the savings for their vacation.

It’s important to choose short-term rewards that reinforce your identity rather than conflict with it. While buying a new jacket may be fine if you’re trying to lose weight or read more books, it doesn’t work if your goal is budgeting and saving money. Instead, consider rewarding yourself with activities that align with your long-term goals, such as taking a bubble bath or going for a leisurely walk, which supports your aspiration for more freedom and financial independence. Similarly, if your reward for exercising is indulging in a bowl of ice cream, you’re reinforcing conflicting identities, which cancels out the benefits. Instead, perhaps your reward could be a massage, which is a luxury that also aligns with caring for your body. Here, the short-term reward complements your long-term vision of becoming a healthier person.

Eventually, as intrinsic rewards like a better mood, increased energy, and reduced stress kick in, you’ll find yourself less focused on chasing secondary rewards. The identity itself becomes the reinforcer; you do it because it’s who you are, and it feels good to be you. The more a habit integrates into your life, the less you need external encouragement to follow through. Incentives can initiate a habit, but identity sustains it.

That said, it takes time for evidence to accumulate and for a new identity to emerge. Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you wait for long-term rewards to arrive.

In summary, a habit needs to be enjoyable to endure. Simple forms of reinforcement—like soap that smells great, toothpaste with a refreshing mint flavor, or seeing $50 added to your savings account—can provide the immediate pleasure necessary to appreciate a habit. Change is easier when it is enjoyable.

Chapter Summary

The fourth Law of Behavior Change is to make it satisfying.

- We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying.

- The human brain evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed ones.

- The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated, and what is immediately punished is avoided.

- To make a habit stick, you need to feel immediately successful, even in small ways.

- The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law—make it satisfying—increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated next time.

Atomic Habits Chapter 14

2025-05-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

In the summer of 1830, Victor Hugo was facing an impossible deadline. Twelve months earlier, the French author had promised his publisher a new book. However, instead of writing, he spent that year pursuing other projects, entertaining guests, and delaying his work. Frustrated, Hugo’s publisher responded by setting a deadline less than six months away: the book had to be finished by February 1831.

To overcome his procrastination, Hugo devised a peculiar plan. He gathered all his clothes and asked an assistant to lock them away in a large chest, leaving him with nothing to wear except a large shawl. Without suitable clothing to go outdoors, he stayed in his study and wrote fervently during the fall and winter of 1830. "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" was published two weeks early, on January 14, 1831.

Sometimes, success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard. This is an inversion of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it difficult. If you find yourself continually struggling to follow through on your plans, you can take a cue from Victor Hugo and enhance the difficulty of your bad habits by creating what psychologists call a commitment device.

A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that influences your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind yourself to positive habits, and restrict yourself from negative ones. When Victor Hugo locked away his clothes to focus on writing, he was effectively creating a commitment device.

There are numerous ways to create a commitment device. You can reduce overeating by purchasing food in individual packages rather than in bulk. You can voluntarily request to be added to the banned list at casinos and online poker sites to prevent future gambling sprees. Some athletes, who need to "make weight" for competitions, choose to leave their wallets at home during the week leading up to weigh-in to avoid being tempted by fast food.

For another example, my friend and fellow habits expert Nir Eyal invested in an outlet timer, an adapter he plugged in between his internet router and the power outlet. Each night at 10 p.m., the outlet timer cut off power to the router. When the internet went off, everyone knew it was time for bed.

Commitment devices are valuable because they enable you to capitalize on your good intentions before you can succumb to temptation. For instance, when I’m trying to cut calories, I ask the waiter to split my meal and box half of it to go before the meal is served. If I wait until the meal arrives and think to myself, “I’ll just eat half,” it rarely works.

The key is to change the task so that it requires more effort to abandon the good habit than to engage in it. If you’re motivated to get in shape, schedule a yoga session and pay for it in advance. If you’re excited about starting a business, email an entrepreneur you respect and set up a consulting call. When the time comes to act, the only way to back out is to cancel the meeting, which requires effort and may cost money.

Commitment devices boost the odds that you’ll make the right choice in the future by making bad habits difficult in the present. However, we can take it a step further. We can make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.

How to Automate a Habit and Never Think About It Again

John Henry Patterson was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1844. He spent his childhood doing chores on the family farm and working shifts at his father’s sawmill. After attending college at Dartmouth, Patterson returned to Ohio and opened a small supply store for coal miners. The store faced little competition and enjoyed a steady customer stream but still struggled to make a profit. It was then that Patterson discovered his employees were stealing from him.

In the mid-1800s, employee theft was a common problem. Receipts were kept in open drawers and could easily be altered or discarded. There were no security cameras to monitor behavior, nor was there software to track transactions. Unless you were willing to supervise your employees constantly or manage all transactions yourself, it was difficult to prevent theft.

As Patterson pondered his dilemma, he stumbled upon an advertisement for a new invention called Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier. Designed by fellow Dayton resident James Ritty, it was the first cash register. The machine automatically locked the cash and receipts inside after each transaction. Patterson bought two for fifty dollars each, and employee theft at his store vanished overnight. In the next six months, Patterson’s business transformed from losing money to earning $5,000 in profit—the equivalent of more than $100,000 today.

Impressed by the machine's effectiveness, Patterson shifted careers. He acquired the rights to Ritty’s invention and founded the National Cash Register Company. Ten years later, National Cash Register had over a thousand employees and was on its way to becoming one of the most successful businesses of its time.

The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act. The brilliance of the cash register was that it automated ethical behavior by making stealing practically impossible. Instead of attempting to change the employees, it made the preferred behavior automatic.

Certain actions—like installing a cash register—yield continuous benefits. These one-time choices require a little effort upfront but create increasing value over time. I’m fascinated by the idea that a single choice can provide ongoing returns, and I've surveyed my readers about their favorite one-time actions that lead to improved long-term habits. The table below highlights some of the most popular responses.

I believe that if the average person were to adopt just half of the one-time actions on this list—even without further consideration of their habits—most would find themselves living a better life a year from now. These one-time actions are a straightforward way to implement the 3rd Law of Behavior Change. They facilitate better sleep, healthier eating, productivity, saving money, and an overall improved life.

One-Time Actions That Lock In Good Habits

- Nutrition:

- Buy a water filter to ensure clean drinking water.

- Use smaller plates to reduce caloric intake.

- Sleep:

- Invest in a good mattress.

- Get blackout curtains.

- Remove your television from your bedroom.

- Productivity:

- Unsubscribe from emails.

- Turn off notifications and mute group chats.

- Set your phone to silent.

- Use email filters to organize your inbox.

- Delete games and social media apps from your phone.

- Happiness:

- Get a dog.

- Move to a friendly, social neighborhood.

- General Health:

- Get vaccinated.

- Buy good shoes to prevent back pain.

- Purchase a supportive chair or standing desk.

- Finance:

- Enroll in an automatic savings plan.

- Set up automatic bill pay.

- Cut cable service.

- Ask service providers to lower your bills.

Of course, there are many ways to automate good habits and eliminate bad ones. Typically, they involve leveraging technology to benefit you. Technology can transform actions that were once hard, annoying, and complicated into behaviors that are easy, painless, and straightforward. It is the most reliable and effective means of ensuring the desired behavior occurs.

This is particularly useful for behaviors that take place too infrequently to become habitual. Tasks you must do monthly or yearly—like rebalancing your investment portfolio—are often not repeated frequently enough to become a habit, making it advantageous for technology to manage them for you.

Other examples include:

- Medicine: Prescriptions can be automatically refilled.

- Personal finance: Employees can save for retirement through automatic wage deductions.

- Cooking: Meal delivery services can take care of your grocery shopping.

- Productivity: Website blockers can restrict social media browsing.

When you automate as many aspects of your life as possible, you can concentrate your efforts on tasks that machines cannot perform. Each habit that we delegate to technology frees up time and energy for more significant personal growth. As mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them."

Of course, the power of technology can also work against us. Binge-watching becomes a habit simply because it requires more effort to stop watching than to continue. Rather than needing to press a button to advance to the next episode, platforms like Netflix or YouTube will autoplay the next episode for you. All you need to do is keep your eyes open.

Technology offers a level of convenience that allows you to act on your smallest whims and desires. With the mere suggestion of hunger, you can have food delivered to your door. At the slightest hint of boredom, you can get lost in the vast expanse of social media. When the effort required to act on your desires is effectively zero, you risk slipping into whatever impulse arises at that moment.

The downside of automation is that we can find ourselves bouncing from easy task to easy task without dedicating time to more challenging but ultimately rewarding work. I often find myself gravitating toward social media during any downtime. If I feel bored for just a moment, I reach for my phone. It's easy to dismiss these brief distractions as "just taking a break," but they can accumulate into a significant issue over time. The constant tug of "just one more minute" can prevent me from accomplishing anything meaningful. (I’m not alone in this; the average person spends over two hours per day on social media—imagine what you could achieve with an extra six hundred hours per year!)

While writing this book, I implemented a new time management strategy. Every Monday, my assistant would reset the passwords on all my social media accounts, logging me out on every device. All week, I worked without distraction, and on Friday, she would send me the new passwords. I had the entire weekend to enjoy social media until Monday morning when she would do it again. (If you don’t have an assistant, consider teaming up with a friend or family member to reset each other’s passwords weekly.)

One of the biggest surprises was how quickly I adapted. Within the first week of locking myself out of social media, I realized that I didn't need to check it nearly as often as I had been, and I certainly didn't need it every day. It had simply been so easy that it had become the default. Once my bad habit became impossible, I found that I did indeed have the motivation to work on more meaningful tasks. After I removed the mental clutter from my environment, it became much easier to engage in healthier activities.

When used effectively, automation can make your good habits inevitable and your bad habits impossible. It is the ultimate method for locking in future behavior rather than relying on willpower at the moment. By utilizing commitment devices, making strategic one-time decisions, and leveraging technology, you can create an environment of inevitability—a space where good habits are not just an outcome you wish for, but an outcome that is virtually guaranteed.

Chapter Summary

- The inversion of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change is to make it difficult.

- A commitment device is a choice made in the present that locks in better behavior in the future.

- The ultimate way to ensure future behavior is to automate your habits.

- One-time actions—like buying a better mattress or enrolling in an automatic savings plan—are single actions that automate your future habits and deliver increasing returns over time.

- Using technology to automate your habits is the most reliable and effective strategy for guaranteeing the right behavior.

Atomic Habits Chapter 13

2025-05-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

Twyla Tharp is widely regarded as one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of the modern era. In 1992, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the Genius Grant, and she has spent the bulk of her career touring the globe to perform her original works. She also credits much of her success to simple daily habits.

“I begin each day of my life with a ritual,” she writes. “I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirt, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours.

“The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go, I have completed the ritual.

“It’s a simple act, but doing it the same way each morning habitualizes it—makes it repeatable and easy to do. It reduces the chance that I would skip it or do it differently. It is one more item in my arsenal of routines and one less thing to think about.”

Hailing a cab each morning may be a tiny action, but it is a splendid example of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change.

Researchers estimate that 40 to 50 percent of our actions on any given day are done out of habit. This is already a substantial percentage, but the true influence of your habits is even greater than these numbers suggest. Habits are automatic choices that influence the conscious decisions that follow. Yes, a habit can be completed in just a few seconds, but it can also shape the actions you take for minutes or hours afterward.

Habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway. They lead you down a path, and before you know it, you’re speeding toward the next behavior. It seems easier to continue what you are already doing than to start doing something different. You sit through a bad movie for two hours. You keep snacking even when you’re already full. You check your phone for “just a second” and soon you have spent twenty minutes staring at the screen. In this way, the habits you follow without thinking often determine the choices you make when you are thinking.

Each evening, there is a tiny moment—usually around 5:15 p.m.—that shapes the rest of my night. My wife walks in the door from work, and we either change into our workout clothes and head to the gym or we crash onto the couch, order Indian food, and watch *The Office*. Similar to Twyla Tharp hailing the cab, the ritual is changing into my workout clothes. If I change clothes, I know the workout will happen. Everything that follows—driving to the gym, deciding which exercises to do, stepping under the bar—is easy once I’ve taken the first step.

Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments. The moment you decide between ordering takeout or cooking dinner. The moment you choose between driving your car or riding your bike. The moment you decide between starting your homework or grabbing the video game controller. These choices are a fork in the road.

Decisive Moments

The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments. Each one is like a fork in the road, and these choices stack up throughout the day and can ultimately lead to very different outcomes. Decisive moments set the options available to your future self.

For instance, walking into a restaurant is a decisive moment because it determines what you’ll be eating for lunch. Technically, you are in control of what you order, but in a larger sense, you can only order an item if it is on the menu. If you walk into a steakhouse, you can get a sirloin or a rib-eye, but not sushi. Your options are constrained by what’s available. They are shaped by the first choice.

We are limited by where our habits lead us. This is why mastering the decisive moments throughout your day is so important. Each day is made up of many moments, but it is really a few habitual choices that determine the path you take. These little choices stack up, each one setting the trajectory for how you spend the next chunk of time. Habits are the entry point, not the end point. They are the cab, not the gym.

The Two-Minute Rule

Even when you know you should start small, it’s easy to start too big. When you dream about making a change, excitement inevitably takes over and you end up trying to do too much too soon. The most effective way I know to counteract this tendency is to use the Two-Minute Rule, which states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”

You’ll find that nearly any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version:

- “Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.”

- “Do thirty minutes of yoga” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.”

- “Study for class” becomes “Open my notes.”

- “Fold the laundry” becomes “Fold one pair of socks.”

- “Run three miles” becomes “Tie my running shoes.”

The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. Anyone can meditate for one minute, read one page, or put one item of clothing away. And, as we have just discussed, this is a powerful strategy because once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it. A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path.

You can usually figure out the gateway habits that will lead to your desired outcome by mapping out your goals on a scale from “very easy” to “very hard.” For instance, running a marathon is very hard. Running a 5K is hard. Walking ten thousand steps is moderately difficult. Walking ten minutes is easy. And putting on your running shoes is very easy. Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes. That’s how you follow the Two-Minute Rule.

Examples of Habit Scaling

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People often think it’s weird to get hyped about reading one page, meditating for one minute, or making one sales call. But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.

As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine. This is not merely a hack to make habits easier but actually the ideal way to master a difficult skill. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. By doing the same warm-up before every workout, you make it easier to get into a state of peak performance. By following the same creative ritual, you make it easier to do the hard work of creating. By developing a consistent power-down habit, you make it easier to get to bed at a reasonable time each night. You may not be able to automate the whole process, but you can make the first action mindless. Make it easy to start, and the rest will follow.

The Two-Minute Rule may seem like a trick to some people. You know that the real goal is to do more than just two minutes, so it may feel like you’re trying to fool yourself. Nobody is actually aspiring to read one page, do one push-up, or open their notes. And if you know it’s a mental trick, why would you fall for it?

If the Two-Minute Rule feels forced, try this: do it for two minutes and then stop. Go for a run, but you must stop after two minutes. Start meditating, but you must stop after two minutes. Study Arabic, but you must stop after two minutes. It’s not just a strategy for starting; it’s the whole thing. Your habit can only last one hundred and twenty seconds.

One of my readers used this strategy to lose over one hundred pounds. In the beginning, he went to the gym each day, but he told himself he wasn’t allowed to stay for more than five minutes. He would go to the gym, exercise for five minutes, and leave as soon as his time was up. After a few weeks, he looked around and thought, “Well, I’m always coming here anyway. I might as well start staying a little longer.” A few years later, the weight was gone.

Journaling provides another example. Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and onto paper, but most people give up after a few days or avoid it entirely because journaling feels like a chore. The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. Greg McKeown, a leadership consultant from the United Kingdom, built a daily journaling habit by specifically writing less than he felt he should. He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle. Ernest Hemingway believed in similar advice for any kind of writing. “The best way is to always stop when you are going good,” he said.

Strategies like this work for another reason, too: they reinforce the identity you want to build. If you show up at the gym five days in a row—even if it’s just for two minutes—you are casting votes for your new identity. You’re not worried about getting in shape; you’re focused on becoming the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.

We rarely think about change this way because everyone is consumed by the end goal. But one push-up is better than not exercising. One minute of guitar practice is better than none at all. One minute of reading is better than never picking up a book. It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.

At some point, once you’ve established the habit and you’re showing up each day, you can combine the Two-Minute Rule with a technique we call habit shaping to scale your habit back up toward your ultimate goal. Start by mastering the first two minutes of the smallest version of the behavior. Then, advance to an intermediate step and repeat the process—focusing on just the first two minutes and mastering that stage before moving on to the next level. Eventually, you’ll end up with the habit you had originally hoped to build while still keeping your focus where it should be: on the first two minutes of the behavior.

Examples of Habit Shaping

Becoming an Early Riser

- Phase 1: Be home by 10 p.m. every night.

- Phase 2: Have all devices (TV, phone, etc.) turned off by 10 p.m. every night.

- Phase 3: Be in bed by 10 p.m. every night (reading a book, talking with your partner).

- Phase 4: Lights off by 10 p.m. every night.

- Phase 5: Wake up at 6 a.m. every day.

Becoming Vegan

- Phase 1: Start eating vegetables at each meal.

- Phase 2: Stop eating animals with four legs (cow, pig, lamb, etc.).

- Phase 3: Stop eating animals with two legs (chicken, turkey, etc.).

- Phase 4: Stop eating animals with no legs (fish, clams, scallops, etc.).

- Phase 5: Stop eating all animal products (eggs, milk, cheese).

Starting to Exercise

- Phase 1: Change into workout clothes.

- Phase 2: Step out the door (try taking a walk).

- Phase 3: Drive to the gym, exercise for five minutes, and leave.

- Phase 4: Exercise for fifteen minutes at least once per week.

- Phase 5: Exercise three times per week.

Nearly any larger life goal can be transformed into a two-minute behavior.

For example:

I want to live a healthy and long life > I need to stay in shape > I need to exercise > I need to change into my workout clothes. I want to have a happy marriage > I need to be a good partner > I should do something each day to make my partner’s life easier > I should meal plan for next week.

Whenever you are struggling to stick with a habit, you can employ the Two-Minute Rule. It’s a simple way to make your habits easy.

Chapter Summary

- Habits can be completed in a few seconds but continue to impact your behavior for minutes or hours afterward.

- Many habits occur at decisive moments—choices that are like a fork in the road—and either send you in the direction of a productive day or an unproductive one.

- The Two-Minute Rule states that when you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.

- The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into a state of deep focus that is required to do great things.

- Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.

Atomic Habits Chapter 12

2025-05-11T02:57:00.000-07:00

The Law of Least Effort

In his award-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, anthropologist and biologist Jared Diamond points out a simple fact: different continents have different shapes. At first glance, this statement seems rather obvious and unimportant, but it turns out to have a profound impact on human behavior.

The primary axis of the Americas runs from north to south. That is, the landmass of North and South America tends to be tall and thin rather than wide and fat. The same is generally true for Africa. Meanwhile, the landmass that makes up Europe, Asia, and the Middle East is the opposite. This massive stretch of land tends to be more east-west in shape. According to Diamond, this difference in shape played a significant role in the spread of agriculture over the centuries.

When agriculture began to spread around the globe, farmers had an easier time expanding along east-west routes than along north-south ones. This is because locations along the same latitude generally share similar climates, amounts of sunlight and rainfall, and changes in seasons. These factors allowed farmers in Europe and Asia to domesticate a few crops and grow them along the entire stretch of land from France to China.

The Shape of Human Behavior

FIGURE 13:

The primary axis of Europe and Asia is east-west. The primary axis of the Americas and Africa is north-south. This shape leads to a wider range of climates up and down the Americas than across Europe and Asia. As a result, agriculture spread nearly twice as fast across Europe and Asia than it did elsewhere. The behavior of farmers—even across hundreds or thousands of years—was constrained by the amount of friction in the environment.

By comparison, the climate varies greatly when traveling from north to south. Just imagine how different the weather is in Florida compared to Canada. You can be the most talented farmer in the world, but it won’t help you grow Florida oranges in the Canadian winter. Snow is a poor substitute for soil. In order to spread crops along north-south routes, farmers would need to find and domesticate new plants whenever the climate changed.

As a result, agriculture spread two to three times faster across Asia and Europe than it did up and down the Americas. Over the span of centuries, this small difference had a very big impact. Increased food production allowed for more rapid population growth. With more people, these cultures were able to build stronger armies and were better equipped to develop new technologies. The changes started out small—a crop that spread slightly farther, a population that grew slightly faster—but compounded into substantial differences over time.

The spread of agriculture provides an example of the third Law of Behavior Change on a global scale. Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity bestseller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one. Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible. It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.

For example, it’s easier to expand your farm to the east, where you can grow the same crops, than to head north, where the climate is different. Out of all the possible actions we could take, the one that is realized is the one that delivers the most value for the least effort. We are motivated to do what is easy.

Every action requires a certain amount of energy. The more energy required, the less likely it is to occur. If your goal is to do a hundred push-ups per day, that’s a lot of energy! In the beginning, when you’re motivated and excited, you can muster the strength to get started. But after a few days, such a massive effort feels exhausting. Meanwhile, sticking to the habit of doing one push-up per day requires almost no energy to get started. And the less energy a habit requires, the more likely it is to occur.

Look at any behavior that fills up much of your life, and you’ll see that it can be performed with very low levels of motivation. Habits like scrolling on our phones, checking email, and watching television steal so much of our time because they can be performed almost without effort. They are remarkably convenient.

In a sense, every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want. Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit. Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm. Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly. You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state. This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.

But what about all the moments when we seem to do the opposite? If we’re all so lazy, then how do you explain people accomplishing hard things like raising a child or starting a business or climbing Mount Everest? Certainly, you are capable of doing very hard things. The problem is that on some days you feel like doing the hard work, and on other days you feel like giving in. On the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible so that you can overcome the challenges life naturally throws your way. The less friction you face, the easier it is for your stronger self to emerge. The idea behind making it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that pay off in the long run.

HOW TO ACHIEVE MORE WITH LESS EFFORT

Imagine you are holding a garden hose that is bent in the middle. Some water can flow through, but not very much. If you want to increase the rate at which water passes through the hose, you have two options. The first option is to crank up the valve and force more water out. The second option is to simply remove the bend in the hose and let water flow through naturally.

Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life. Meanwhile, making your habits simple and easy is like removing the bend in the hose. Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.

One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design. In Chapter 6, we discussed environment design as a method for making cues more obvious, but you can also optimize your environment to make actions easier. For example, when deciding where to practice a new habit, it is best to choose a place that is already along the path of your daily routine. Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life. You are more likely to go to the gym if it is on your way to work because stopping doesn’t add much friction to your lifestyle. By comparison, if the gym is off the path of your normal commute—even by just a few blocks—you’re now going “out of your way” to get there.

Perhaps even more effective is reducing the friction within your home or office. Too often, we try to start habits in high-friction environments. We try to follow a strict diet while we are out to dinner with friends. We try to write a book in a chaotic household. We try to concentrate while using a smartphone filled with distractions. It doesn’t have to be this way; we can remove the points of friction that hold us back.

This is precisely what electronics manufacturers in Japan began to do in the 1970s. In an article published in *The New Yorker* titled “Better All the Time,” James Suroweicki writes:

“Japanese firms emphasized what came to be known as ‘lean production,’ relentlessly looking to remove waste of all kinds from the production process, down to redesigning workspaces so workers didn’t have to waste time twisting and turning to reach their tools. The result was that Japanese factories were more efficient and Japanese products were more reliable than American ones. In 1974, service calls for American-made color televisions were five times as common as for Japanese televisions. By 1979, it took American workers three times as long to assemble their sets.”

I like to refer to this strategy as addition by subtraction. The Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it. As they subtracted wasted effort, they added customers and revenue. Similarly, when we remove the points of friction that sap our time and energy, we can achieve more with less effort. (This is one reason tidying up can feel so good: we are simultaneously moving forward and lightening the cognitive load our environment places on us.)

If you look at the most habit-forming products, you’ll notice that one of the things these goods and services do best is remove little bits of friction from your life. Meal delivery services reduce the friction of shopping for groceries. Dating apps reduce the friction of making social introductions. Ride-sharing services reduce the friction of getting across town. Text messaging reduces the friction of sending a letter in the mail.

Like a Japanese television manufacturer redesigning their workspace to reduce wasted motion, successful companies design their products to automate, eliminate, or simplify as many steps as possible. They reduce the number of fields on each form. They pare down the number of clicks required to create an account. They deliver their products with easy-to-understand directions or ask their customers to make fewer choices.

When the first voice-activated speakers were released—products like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and Apple HomePod—I asked a friend what he liked about the product he had purchased. He said it was just easier to say, “Play some country music,” than to pull out his phone, open the music app, and pick a playlist. Of course, just a few years earlier, having unlimited access to music in your pocket was a remarkably frictionless behavior compared to driving to the store and buying a CD. Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.

Similar strategies have been used effectively by governments. When the British government wanted to increase tax collection rates, they switched from sending citizens to a web page where the tax form could be downloaded to linking directly to the form. Reducing that one step in the process increased the response rate from 19.2 percent to 23.4 percent. For a country like the United Kingdom, those percentage points represent millions in tax revenue.

The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.

PRIME THE ENVIRONMENT FOR FUTURE USE

Oswald Nuckols is an IT developer from Natchez, Mississippi. He is also someone who understands the power of priming his environment. Nuckols dialed in his cleaning habits by following a strategy he refers to as “resetting the room.” For instance, when he finishes watching television, he places the remote back on the TV stand, arranges the pillows on the couch, and folds the blanket. When he leaves his car, he throws any trash away. Whenever he takes a shower, he wipes down the toilet while the shower is warming up. (As he notes, the “perfect time to clean the toilet is right before you wash yourself in the shower anyway.”) The purpose of resetting each room is not simply to clean up after the last action but to prepare for the next action.

“When I walk into a room, everything is in its right place,” Nuckols wrote. “Because I do this every day in every room, stuff always stays in good shape. . . . People think I work hard, but I’m actually really lazy. I’m just proactively lazy. It gives you so much time back.”

Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy. For instance, my wife keeps a box of greeting cards that are pre-sorted by occasion—birthday, sympathy, wedding, graduation, and more. Whenever necessary, she grabs an appropriate card and sends it off. She is incredibly good at remembering to send cards because she has reduced the friction of doing so. For years, I was the opposite. Someone would have a baby, and I would think, “I should send a card.” But then weeks would pass, and by the time I remembered to pick one up at the store, it was too late. The habit wasn’t easy.

There are many ways to prime your environment so it’s ready for immediate use. If you want to cook a healthy breakfast, place the skillet on the stove, set the cooking spray on the counter, and lay out any plates and utensils you’ll need the night before. When you wake up, making breakfast will be easy.

Want to draw more? Put your pencils, pens, notebooks, and drawing tools on top of your desk, within easy reach.

Want to exercise? Set out your workout clothes, shoes, gym bag, and water bottle ahead of time.

Want to improve your diet? Chop up a ton of fruits and vegetables on weekends and pack them in containers so you have easy access to healthy, ready-to-eat options during the week.

These are simple ways to make the good habit the path of least resistance.

You can also invert this principle and prime the environment to make bad behaviors difficult. If you find yourself watching too much television, for example, then unplug it after each use. Only plug it back in if you can say out loud the name of the show you want to watch. This setup creates just enough friction to prevent mindless viewing.

If that doesn’t do it, you can take it a step further. Unplug the television and take the batteries out of the remote after each use, so it takes an extra ten seconds to turn it back on. And if you’re really hardcore, move the television out of the living room and into a closet after each use. You can be sure you’ll only take it out when you really want to watch something. The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.

Whenever possible, I leave my phone in a different room until lunch. When it’s right next to me, I’ll check it all morning for no reason at all. But when it is in another room, I rarely think about it. And the friction is high enough that I won’t go get it without a reason. As a result, I get three to four hours each morning when I can work without interruption.

If sticking your phone in another room doesn’t seem like enough, tell a friend or family member to hide it from you for a few hours. Ask a coworker to keep it at their desk in the morning and give it back to you at lunch.

It is remarkable how little friction is required to prevent unwanted behavior. When I hide beer in the back of the fridge where I can’t see it, I drink less. When I delete social media apps from my phone, it can be weeks before I download them again and log in. These tricks are unlikely to curb a true addiction, but for many of us, a little bit of friction can be the difference between sticking with a good habit or sliding into a bad one.

Imagine the cumulative impact of making dozens of these changes and living in an environment designed to make good behaviors easier and bad behaviors harder. Whether we are approaching behavior change as an individual, a parent, a coach, or a leader, we should ask ourselves the same question: “How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?” Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.

Chapter Summary

- Human behavior follows the Law of Least Effort. We will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.

- Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.

- Reduce the friction associated with good behaviors. When friction is low, habits are easy.

- Increase the friction associated with bad behaviors. When friction is high, habits are difficult.

- Prime your environment to make future actions easier.

Atomic Habits Chapter 11

2025-05-10T17:50:00.000-07:00

Walk Slowly, but Never Backward

On the first day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups. Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be part of the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on. Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be assessed only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.

At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.

It's easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We become so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

I refer to this as the difference between being in motion and taking action. The two concepts sound similar, but they’re not the same. When you’re in motion, you’re planning, strategizing, and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that delivers an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action.

Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself. It doesn’t matter how many times you talk to a personal trainer; that motion will never get you in shape. Only the action of working out will yield the results you’re looking to achieve.

If motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we engage in it? Sometimes we do it because we genuinely need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without the risk of failure. Most of us are experts at avoiding criticism. It doesn’t feel good to fail or to be judged publicly, so we tend to avoid situations where that might happen. And that’s the biggest reason why we slip into motion rather than taking action: we want to delay failure.

It’s easy to be in motion and convince yourself that you’re making progress. You think, “I’ve got conversations going with four potential clients right now. This is good. We’re moving in the right direction.” Or, “I brainstormed some ideas for that book I want to write. This is coming together.” Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But in reality, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning; you want to be practicing.

If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit; you just need to practice it. This is the first takeaway of the 3rd Law: you just need to get your reps in.

How Long Does It Actually Take to Form a New Habit?

Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition. The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity. Neuroscientists call this long-term potentiation, which refers to the strengthening of connections between neurons in the brain based on recent patterns of activity. With each repetition, cell-to-cell signaling improves, and the neural connections tighten. First described by neuropsychologist Donald Hebb in 1949, this phenomenon is commonly known as Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”

Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain. In musicians, the cerebellum—critical for physical movements like plucking a guitar string or pulling a violin bow—is larger than it is in non-musicians. Mathematicians, meanwhile, have increased gray matter in the inferior parietal lobule, which plays a key role in computation and calculation. Its size is directly correlated with the amount of time spent in the field; the older and more experienced the mathematician, the greater the increase in gray matter.

When scientists analyzed the brains of taxi drivers in London, they found that the hippocampus—a region of the brain involved in spatial memory—was significantly larger in their subjects than in non-taxi drivers. Even more fascinating, the hippocampus decreased in size when a driver retired. Like the muscles of the body responding to regular weight training, particular regions of the brain adapt as they are used and atrophy as they are abandoned.

Of course, the importance of repetition in establishing habits was recognized long before neuroscientists began poking around. In 1860, the English philosopher George H. Lewes observed, “In learning to speak a new language, to play on a musical instrument, or to perform unaccustomed movements, great difficulty is felt, because the channels through which each sensation has to pass have not become established; but no sooner has frequent repetition cut a pathway than this difficulty vanishes; the actions become so automatic that they can be performed while the mind is otherwise engaged.” Both common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a form of change.

Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. This means that simply putting in your repetitions is one of the most critical steps you can take to encode a new habit. It is why the students who took tons of photos improved their skills while those who merely theorized about perfect photos did not. One group engaged in active practice, while the other engaged in passive learning. One was in action, the other in motion.

All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice to automatic behavior, a process known as automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step, which occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over.

It looks like this

**FIGURE 11:** In the beginning (point A), a habit requires significant effort and concentration to perform. After a few repetitions (point B), it gets easier but still requires some conscious attention. With enough practice (point C), the habit becomes more automatic than conscious. Beyond this threshold—the habit line—the behavior can be performed more or less without thinking. A new habit has been formed.

On the following page, you’ll see what it looks like when researchers track the level of automaticity for a habit like walking for ten minutes each day. The shape of these charts, which scientists call learning curves, reveals an important truth about behavior change: habits form based on frequency, not time.

**FIGURE 12:** This graph shows someone who built the habit of walking for ten minutes after breakfast each day. Notice that as the repetitions increase, so does automaticity, until the behavior is as easy and automatic as it can be.

One of the most common questions I hear is, “How long does it take to build a new habit?” But what people really should be asking is, “How many repetitions does it take to form a new habit?” In other words, how many repetitions are required to make a habit automatic?

There is nothing magical about the passage of time in relation to habit formation. It doesn’t matter if it’s been twenty-one days, thirty days, or three hundred days. What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior. You could do something twice in thirty days, or two hundred times. It’s the frequency that makes the difference. Your current habits have been internalized over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of repetitions. New habits require the same level of frequency. You need to string together enough successful attempts until the behavior is firmly embedded in your mind, and you cross the Habit Line.

In practice, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes for a habit to become automatic. What matters is that you take the actions you need to take to make progress. Whether an action is fully automatic is of less importance.

To build a habit, you need to practice it. And the most effective way to facilitate practice is to adhere to the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it easy. The chapters that follow will show you how to do exactly that.

Chapter Summary

- The 3rd Law of Behavior Change is to make it easy.

- The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.

- Focus on taking action, not being in motion.

- Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition.

- The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.

Atomic Habits Chapter 10

2025-05-09T05:51:00.000-07:00

How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

In late 2012, I was sitting in an old apartment just a few blocks from Istanbul’s most famous street, Istiklal Caddesi. I was in the middle of a four-day trip to Turkey, and my guide, Mike, was relaxing in a worn-out armchair a few feet away. Mike wasn’t really a guide; he was just a guy from Maine who had been living in Turkey for five years. He offered to show me around while I was visiting the country, and I took him up on it. On this particular night, I had been invited to dinner with him and a handful of his Turkish friends.

There were seven of us, and I was the only one who hadn’t, at some point, smoked at least one pack of cigarettes per day. I asked one of the Turks how he got started. “Friends,” he said. “It always starts with your friends. One friend smokes, then you try it.”

What was truly fascinating was that half of the people in the room had managed to quit smoking. Mike had been smoke-free for a few years at that point, and he swore up and down that he broke the habit because of a book called *Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking*. “It frees you from the mental burden of smoking,” he said. “It tells you: 'Stop lying to yourself. You know you don’t actually want to smoke. You know you don’t really enjoy this.' It helps you feel like you’re not the victim anymore. You start to realize that you don’t need to smoke.”

I had never tried a cigarette, but I took a look at the book afterward out of curiosity. The author employs an interesting strategy to help smokers eliminate their cravings. He systematically reframes each cue associated with smoking and gives it a new meaning.

He says things like:

- You think you are quitting something, but you’re not quitting anything because cigarettes do nothing for you.

- You think smoking is something you need to do to be social, but it’s not. You can be social without smoking at all.

- You think smoking is about relieving stress, but it’s not. Smoking does not relieve your nerves; it destroys them.

Over and over, he repeats these phrases and others like them. “Get it clearly into your mind,” he says. “You are losing nothing, and you are making marvelous positive gains not only in health, energy, and money but also in confidence, self-respect, freedom, and, most important of all, in the length and quality of your future life.”

By the time you get to the end of the book, smoking seems like the most ridiculous thing in the world to do. And if you no longer expect smoking to bring you any benefits, you have no reason to smoke. It is an inversion of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change: make it unattractive.

Now, I know this idea might sound overly simplistic: just change your mind, and you can quit smoking. But stick with me for a minute.

Where Cravings Come From

Every behavior has a surface-level craving and a deeper, underlying motive. I often have a craving that goes something like this: “I want to eat tacos.” If you were to ask me why I want to eat tacos, I wouldn’t say, “Because I need food to survive.” But the truth is, somewhere deep down, I am motivated to eat tacos because I have to eat to survive. The underlying motive is to obtain food and water, even if my specific craving is for a taco.

Some of our underlying motives include:

- Conserve energy

- Obtain food and water

- Find love and reproduce

- Connect and bond with others

- Win social acceptance and approval

- Reduce uncertainty

- Achieve status and prestige

A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. Your brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or check Instagram or play video games. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, win social acceptance and approval, or achieve status.

Look at nearly any product that is habit-forming, and you’ll see that it does not create a new motivation but rather latches onto the underlying motives of human nature:

- Find love and reproduce = using Tinder

- Connect and bond with others = browsing Facebook

- Win social acceptance and approval = posting on Instagram

- Reduce uncertainty = searching on Google

- Achieve status and prestige = playing video games

Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires—new versions of old vices. The underlying motives behind human behavior remain the same. The specific habits we perform differ based on the period of history.

Here’s the powerful part: there are many different ways to address the same underlying motive. One person might learn to reduce stress by smoking a cigarette. Another person learns to ease their anxiety by going for a run. Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.

Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or not. As we covered in our discussion of the 1st Law, your brain is continually absorbing information and noticing cues in the environment. Every time you perceive a cue, your brain runs a simulation and makes a prediction about what to do in the next moment.

Cue: You notice that the stove is hot.

Prediction: If I touch it, I’ll get burned, so I should avoid touching it.

Cue: You see that the traffic light turned green.

Prediction: If I step on the gas, I’ll make it safely through the intersection and get closer to my destination, so I should step on the gas.

You see a cue, categorize it based on past experience, and determine the appropriate response.

This all happens in an instant, but it plays a crucial role in your habits because every action is preceded by a prediction. Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess about how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.

Our behavior is heavily dependent on these predictions. Put another way, our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves. Two people can look at the same cigarette, and one feels the urge to smoke while the other is repulsed by the smell. The same cue can spark a good habit or a bad habit depending on your prediction.

The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving—a feeling, a desire, an urge. Feelings and emotions transform the cues we perceive and the predictions we make into a signal that we can apply. They help explain what we are currently sensing. For instance, whether or not you realize it, you are noticing how warm or cold you feel right now. If the temperature drops by one degree, you probably won’t do anything. If the temperature drops ten degrees, however, you’ll feel cold and put on another layer of clothing. Feeling cold was the signal that prompted you to act. You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action.

A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state. When the temperature falls, there is a gap between what your body is currently sensing and what it wants to be sensing. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act.

Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat, light up, or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.

Our feelings and emotions tell us whether to hold steady in our current state or to make a change. They help us decide the best course of action. Neurologists have discovered that when emotions and feelings are impaired, we actually lose the ability to make decisions. We have no signal of what to pursue and what to avoid. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.”

To summarize, the specific cravings you feel and the habits you perform are really an attempt to address your fundamental underlying motives. Whenever a habit successfully addresses a motive, you develop a craving to do it again. In time, you learn to predict that checking social media will help you feel loved or that watching YouTube will allow you to forget your fears. Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings, and we can use this insight to our advantage rather than to our detriment.

How to Reprogram Your Brain to Enjoy Hard Habits

You can make hard habits more attractive if you learn to associate them with a positive experience. Sometimes, all you need is a slight mindset shift. For instance, we often talk about everything we have to do in a given day. You have to wake up early for work. You have to make another sales call for your business. You have to cook dinner for your family.

Now, imagine changing just one word: You don’t “have” to; you “get” to.

You get to wake up early for work. You get to make another sales call for your business. You get to cook dinner for your family. By simply changing one word, you shift the way you view each event. You transition from seeing these behaviors as burdens to viewing them as opportunities.

The key point is that both versions of reality are true. You have to do those things, and you also get to do them. We can find evidence for whatever mindset we choose.

I once heard a story about a man who uses a wheelchair. When asked if it was difficult being confined, he responded, “I’m not confined to my wheelchair—I am liberated by it. If it wasn’t for my wheelchair, I would be bed-bound and never able to leave my house.” This shift in perspective completely transformed how he lived each day.

Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.

**Exercise.**

Many people associate exercise with a challenging task that drains energy and wears you down. You can just as easily view it as a way to develop skills and build yourself up. Instead of telling yourself, “I need to go run in the morning,” say, “It’s time to build endurance and get faster.”

**Finance.**

Saving money is often associated with sacrifice. However, you can associate it with freedom rather than limitation if you realize one simple truth: living below your current means increases your future means. The money you save this month increases your purchasing power next month.

**Meditation.**

Anyone who has tried meditation for more than three seconds knows how frustrating it can be when the next distraction inevitably pops into your mind. You can transform frustration into delight when you realize that each interruption gives you a chance to practice returning to your breath. Distraction is a good thing because you need distractions to practice meditation.

**Pregame jitters**

Many people feel anxious before delivering a big presentation or competing in an important event. They experience quicker breathing, a faster heart rate, and heightened arousal. If we interpret these feelings negatively, we feel threatened and tense up. If we interpret these feelings positively, we can respond with fluidity and grace. You can reframe “I am nervous” to “I am excited, and I’m getting an adrenaline rush to help me concentrate.”

These little mindset shifts aren’t magic, but they can help change the feelings you associate with a particular habit or situation.

If you want to take it a step further, you can create a motivation ritual. Simply practice associating your habits with something you enjoy, then use that cue whenever you need a bit of motivation. For instance, if you always play the same song before having sex, you’ll begin to link the music with the act. Whenever you want to get in the mood, just press play.

Ed Latimore, a boxer and writer from Pittsburgh, benefited from a similar strategy without knowing it. “Odd realization,” he wrote. “My focus and concentration go up just by putting my headphones on while writing. I don’t even have to play any music.” Without realizing it, he was conditioning himself. In the beginning, he put his headphones on, played some music he enjoyed, and did focused work. After doing it five, ten, or twenty times, putting on his headphones became a cue that he automatically associated with increased focus. The craving followed naturally.

Athletes use similar strategies to get themselves in the mindset to perform. During my baseball career, I developed a specific ritual of stretching and throwing before each game. The whole sequence took about ten minutes, and I did it the same way every single time. While it physically warmed me up to play, more importantly, it put me in the right mental state. I began to associate my pregame ritual with feeling competitive and focused. Even if I wasn’t motivated beforehand, by the time I was done with my ritual, I was in “game mode.”

You can adapt this strategy for nearly any purpose. Say you want to feel happier in general. Find something that makes you truly happy—like petting your dog or taking a bubble bath—and then create a short routine that you perform every time before you do the thing you love. Maybe you take three deep breaths and smile:

- Three deep breaths.

- Smile.

- Pet the dog.

- Repeat.

Eventually, you’ll begin to associate this breathe-and-smile routine with being in a good mood. It becomes a cue that means feeling happy. Once established, you can break it out anytime you need to change your emotional state. Stressed at work? Take three deep breaths and smile. Sad about life? Three deep breaths and smile. Once a habit has been built, the cue can prompt a craving, even if it has little to do with the original situation.

The key to finding and fixing the causes of your bad habits is to reframe the associations you have about them. It’s not easy, but if you can reprogram your predictions, you can transform a hard habit into an attractive one.

Chapter Summary

- The inversion of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change is to make it unattractive.

- Every behavior has a surface-level craving and a deeper underlying motive.

- Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires.

- The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. The prediction leads to a feeling.

- Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive.

- Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings and unattractive when we associate them with negative feelings.

- Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.

Atomic Habits Chapter 9

2025-05-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

In 1965, a Hungarian man named Laszlo Polgar wrote a series of unusual letters to a woman named Klara. Laszlo was a firm believer in hard work; in fact, it was all he believed in. He completely rejected the idea of innate talent, claiming that with deliberate practice and the development of good habits, a child could become a genius in any field. His mantra was, “A genius is not born, but is educated and trained.”

Laszlo believed in this idea so strongly that he wanted to test it with his own children. He was writing to Klara because he “needed a wife willing to jump on board.” Klara was a teacher, and although she may not have been as adamant as Laszlo, she also believed that with proper instruction, anyone could advance their skills.

Laszlo decided that chess would be a suitable field for the experiment, and he laid out a plan to raise his children to become chess prodigies. The kids would be homeschooled—a rarity in Hungary at the time. The house would be filled with chess books and pictures of famous chess players. The children would play against each other constantly and compete in the best tournaments they could find. The family would maintain a meticulous filing system of the tournament history of every competitor the children faced. Their lives would be dedicated to chess.

Laszlo successfully courted Klara, and within a few years, the Polgars became parents to three young girls: Susan, Sofia, and Judit. Susan, the oldest, began playing chess when she was four years old. Within six months, she was defeating adults.

Sofia, the middle child, did even better. By fourteen, she was a world champion, and a few years later, she became a grandmaster. Judit, the youngest, was the best of all. By age five, she could beat her father. At twelve, she was the youngest player ever listed among the top one hundred chess players in the world. At fifteen years and four months old, she became the youngest grandmaster of all time, younger than Bobby Fischer, the previous record holder. For twenty-seven years, she was the number-one-ranked female chess player in the world.

The childhood of the Polgar sisters was atypical, to say the least. Yet, if you ask them about it, they claim their lifestyle was attractive, even enjoyable. In interviews, the sisters describe their childhood as entertaining rather than grueling. They loved playing chess and couldn’t get enough of it. Once, Laszlo reportedly found Sofia playing chess in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Encouraging her to go back to sleep, he said, “Sofia, leave the pieces alone!” To which she replied, “Daddy, they won’t leave me alone!”

The Polgar sisters grew up in a culture that prioritized chess above all else—praising them for it and rewarding them for it. In their world, an obsession with chess was normal. As we are about to see, whatever habits are considered normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find.

THE SEDUCTIVE PULL OF SOCIAL NORMS

Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, bond with others, and earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse, being cast out—was a death sentence. “The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.” Meanwhile, those who collaborated and bonded with others enjoyed increased safety, mating opportunities, and access to resources. As Charles Darwin noted, “In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

As a result, one of the deepest human desires is to belong, and this ancient preference exerts a powerful influence on our modern behavior. We don’t choose our earliest habits; we imitate them. We follow the script handed down by our friends and family, our church or school, and our local community and society at large. Each of these cultures and groups comes with its own set of expectations and standards—when and whether to get married, how many children to have, which holidays to celebrate, how much money to spend on your child’s birthday party. In many ways, these social norms are the invisible rules that guide your behavior each day. You’re always keeping them in mind, even if they are not at the top of your mind. Often, you follow the habits of your culture without thinking, questioning, or sometimes even remembering. As the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote, “The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.”

Most of the time, going along with the group does not feel like a burden. Everyone wants to belong. If you grow up in a family that rewards you for your chess skills, playing chess will seem very attractive. If you work in a job where everyone wears expensive suits, you’ll be inclined to splurge on one as well. If all your friends are sharing an inside joke or using a new phrase, you’ll want to do it too, so they know that you “get it.” Behaviors are attractive when they help us fit in.

We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:

1. The close.

2. The many.

3. The powerful.

Each group offers an opportunity to leverage the 2nd Law of Behavior Change and make our habits more attractive.

1. Imitating the Close

Proximity has a powerful effect on our behavior. This is true of the physical environment, as we discussed in Chapter 6, but it is also true of the social environment. We pick up habits from the people around us. We copy the way our parents handle arguments, the way our peers flirt with each other, and the way our coworkers achieve results. When your friends smoke pot, you might give it a try, too. When your wife has a habit of double-checking that the door is locked before going to bed, you may pick it up as well.

I find that I often imitate the behavior of those around me without realizing it. In conversation, I’ll automatically assume the body posture of the other person. In college, I began to talk like my roommates. When traveling to other countries, I unconsciously imitate the local accent, despite reminding myself to stop.

As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits. One groundbreaking study tracked twelve thousand people for thirty-two years and found that “a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who became obese.” It works the other way, too. Another study found that if one person in a relationship lost weight, the other partner would also slim down about one-third of the time. Our friends and family provide a sort of invisible peer pressure that pulls us in their direction.

Of course, peer pressure is harmful only if you’re surrounded by negative influences. When astronaut Mike Massimino was a graduate student at MIT, he took a small robotics class. Of the ten people in the class, four became astronauts. If your goal was to make it into space, then that room was about the best culture you could ask for. Similarly, one study found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for natural levels of intelligence. We soak up the qualities and practices of those around us.

One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the norm. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day. If you are surrounded by fit people, you’re more likely to consider working out a common habit. If you’re around jazz lovers, you’re more likely to believe it’s reasonable to play jazz every day. Your culture sets your expectations for what is “normal.” Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to adopt, and you’ll rise together.

To make your habits even more attractive, you can take this strategy one step further. Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group. Steve Kamb, an entrepreneur in New York City, runs a company called Nerd Fitness, which “helps nerds, misfits, and mutants lose weight, get strong, and get healthy.” His clients include video game lovers, movie fanatics, and average Joes who want to get in shape.

Many people feel out of place the first time they go to the gym or try to change their diet, but if you are already similar to other group members in some way—say, your mutual love of Star Wars—change becomes more appealing because it feels like something people like you already do.

Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one. Previously, you were on your own. Your identity was singular. You are a reader. You are a musician. You are an athlete. When you join a book club, a band, or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change are no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers. We are musicians. We are cyclists. The shared identity begins to reinforce your personal identity. This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial for maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.

2. Imitating the Many

In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments that are now taught to legions of undergrads each year. To begin each experiment, the subject entered the room with a group of strangers. Unbeknownst to them, the other participants were actors planted by the researcher and instructed to deliver scripted answers to certain questions.

The group would be shown one card with a line on it and then a second card with a series of lines. Each person was asked to select the line on the second card that was similar in length to the line on the first card. It was a very simple task. Here is an example of two cards used in the experiment:

CONFORMING TO SOCIAL NORMS

FIGURE 10: This is a representation of two cards used by Solomon Asch in his famous social conformity experiments. The length of the line0 on the first card (left) is obviously the same as line C, but when a group of actors claimed it was a different length, the research subjects often changed their minds and went with the crowd rather than trusting their own eyes.

The experiment always began the same. First, there would be some easy trials where everyone agreed on the correct line. After a few rounds, the participants were shown a test that was just as obvious as the previous ones, except the actors in the room would select an intentionally incorrect answer. For example, they would respond “A” to the comparison shown in Figure 10. Everyone would agree that the lines were the same even though they were clearly different.

The subject, who was unaware of the ruse, would immediately become bewildered. Their eyes would widen, and they would laugh nervously to themselves. They would double-check the reactions of other participants. Their agitation would grow as one person after another delivered the same incorrect response. Soon, the subject began to doubt their own eyes. Eventually, they delivered the answer they knew in their heart to be incorrect.

Asch ran this experiment many times and in many different forms. What he discovered was that as the number of actors increased, so did the conformity of the subject. If it was just the subject and one actor, then there was no effect on the person’s choice. They simply assumed they were in the room with a dummy. When two actors were in the room with the subject, there was still little impact. But as the number of people increased to three actors, four, all the way to eight, the subject became more likely to second-guess themselves. By the end of the experiment, nearly 75 percent of the subjects had agreed with the group answer even though it was obviously incorrect.

Whenever we are unsure of how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior. We are constantly scanning our environment and wondering, “What is everyone else doing?” We check reviews on Amazon, Yelp, or TripAdvisor because we want to imitate the “best” buying, eating, and travel habits. It’s usually a smart strategy. There is evidence in numbers.

But there can be a downside. The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. For example, one study found that when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut-cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.

Humans are similar. There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding the truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves.

The human mind knows how to get along with others. It wants to get along with others. This is our natural mode. You can override it—you can choose to ignore the group or to stop caring what other people think—but it takes work. Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort.

When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.

3. Imitating the Powerful

Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige, and status. We want pins and medallions on our jackets. We want "President" or "Partner" in our titles. We want to be acknowledged, recognized, and praised. This tendency can seem vain, but overall, it’s a smart move. Historically, a person with greater power and status has access to more resources, worries less about survival, and proves to be a more attractive mate.

We are drawn to behaviors that earn us respect, approval, admiration, and status. We want to be the one in the gym who can do muscle-ups, the musician who can play the hardest chord progressions, or the parent with the most accomplished children because these things separate us from the crowd. Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.

This is one reason we care so much about the habits of highly effective people. We try to copy the behavior of successful individuals because we desire success ourselves. Many of our daily habits are imitations of people we admire. We replicate the marketing strategies of the most successful firms in our industry. We make recipes from our favorite bakers. We borrow the storytelling strategies of our favorite writers. We mimic the communication style of our boss. We imitate people we envy.

High-status people enjoy the approval, respect, and praise of others. That means if a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.

We are also motivated to avoid behaviors that would lower our status. We trim our hedges and mow our lawns because we don’t want to be the slobs of the neighborhood. When our mother comes to visit, we clean up the house because we don’t want to be judged. We are continually wondering, “What will others think of me?” and altering our behavior based on the answer.

The Polgar sisters—the chess prodigies mentioned at the beginning of this chapter—are evidence of the powerful and lasting impact social influences can have on our behavior. The sisters practiced chess for many hours each day and continued this remarkable effort for decades. But these habits and behaviors maintained their attractiveness, in part, because they were valued by their culture. From the praise of their parents to the achievement of different status markers like becoming a grandmaster, they had many reasons to continue their effort.

Chapter Summary

- The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us.

- We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe.

- We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe), and the powerful (those with status and prestige).

- One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.

- The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves.

- If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.

Atomic Habits Chapter 8

2025-05-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

How to Make a Habit Irresistible

In the 1940s, a Dutch scientist named Niko Tinbergen performed a series of experiments that transformed our understanding of what motivates us. Tinbergen—who eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work—was investigating herring gulls, the gray and white birds often seen flying along the seashores of North America.

Adult herring gulls have a small red dot on their beak, and Tinbergen noticed that newly hatched chicks would peck at this spot whenever they wanted food. To begin one experiment, he created a collection of fake cardboard beaks—just a head without a body. When the parents had flown away, he went over to the nest and offered these dummy beaks to the chicks. The beaks were obvious fakes, and he assumed the baby birds would reject them altogether.

However, when the tiny gulls saw the red spot on the cardboard beak, they pecked away just as if it were attached to their own mother. They had a clear preference for those red spots—as if they had been genetically programmed at birth. Soon, Tinbergen discovered that the bigger the red spot, the faster the chicks pecked. Eventually, he created a beak with three large red dots on it. When he placed it near the nest, the baby birds went crazy with delight. They pecked at the little red patches as if it were the greatest beak they had ever seen.

Tinbergen and his colleagues discovered similar behavior in other animals. For example, the greylag goose is a ground-nesting bird. Occasionally, as the mother moves around on the nest, one of the eggs will roll out and settle on the grass nearby. Whenever this happens, the goose will waddle over to the egg and use its beak and neck to pull it back into the nest.

Tinbergen discovered that the goose will attempt to retrieve any nearby round object, such as a billiard ball or a lightbulb, back into the nest. The bigger the object, the greater their response. One goose even made a tremendous effort to roll a volleyball back and sit on top of it. Like the baby gulls automatically pecking at red dots, the greylag goose was following an instinctive rule: When I see a round object nearby, I must roll it back into the nest. The bigger the round object, the harder I should try to get it.

It’s as if the brain of each animal is preloaded with certain behavioral rules, and when it encounters an exaggerated version of that rule, it lights up like a Christmas tree. Scientists refer to these exaggerated cues as supernormal stimuli. A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a volleyball—and it elicits a stronger response than usual.

Humans are also prone to fall for exaggerated versions of reality. Junk food, for example, drives our reward systems into a frenzy. After spending hundreds of thousands of years hunting and foraging for food in the wild, the human brain has evolved to place a high value on salt, sugar, and fat. Such foods are often calorie-dense and were quite rare when our ancient ancestors roamed the savannah. When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, eating as much as possible is an excellent strategy for survival.

Today, however, we live in a calorie-rich environment. Food is abundant, but your brain continues to crave it as if it is scarce. Placing a high value on salt, sugar, and fat is no longer advantageous to our health, but the craving persists because the brain’s reward centers have not changed for approximately fifty thousand years. The modern food industry relies on stretching our Paleolithic instincts beyond their evolutionary purpose.

A primary goal of food science is to create products that are more attractive to consumers. Nearly every food in a bag, box, or jar has been enhanced in some way, often with additional flavoring. Companies spend millions of dollars to discover the most satisfying level of crunch in a potato chip or the perfect amount of fizz in a soda. Entire departments are dedicated to optimizing how a product feels in your mouth—a quality known as orosensation. French fries, for example, are a potent combination—golden brown and crunchy on the outside, light and smooth on the inside.

Other processed foods enhance dynamic contrast, which refers to items with a combination of sensations, like crunchy and creamy. Imagine the gooeyness of melted cheese on top of a crispy pizza crust or the crunch of an Oreo cookie combined with its smooth center. With natural, unprocessed foods, you tend to experience the same sensations repeatedly—how does that seventeenth bite of kale taste? After a few minutes, your brain loses interest, and you begin to feel full. But foods that are high in dynamic contrast keep the experience novel and interesting, encouraging you to eat more.

Ultimately, such strategies enable food scientists to find the “bliss point” for each product—the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat that excites your brain and keeps you coming back for more. The result, of course, is that you overeat because hyperpalatable foods are more attractive to the human brain. As Stephan Guyenet, a neuroscientist who specializes in eating behavior and obesity, says, “We’ve gotten too good at pushing our own buttons.”

The modern food industry, and the overeating habits it has spawned, is just one example of the second Law of Behavior Change: Make it attractive. The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.

Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in. Stores feature mannequins with exaggerated hips and breasts to sell clothes. Social media delivers more “likes” and praise in a few minutes than we could ever get in the office or at home. Online pornography splices together stimulating scenes at a rate that would be impossible to replicate in real life. Advertisements are created with a combination of ideal lighting, professional makeup, and Photoshopped edits— even the model doesn’t look like the person in the final image. These are the supernormal stimuli of our modern world. They exaggerate features that are naturally attractive to us, and our instincts go wild as a result, driving us into excessive habits related to shopping, social media, pornography, eating, and many others.

If history serves as a guide, the opportunities of the future will be more attractive than those of today. The trend is for rewards to become more concentrated and stimuli to become more enticing. Junk food is a more concentrated form of calories than natural foods. Hard liquor is a more concentrated form of alcohol than beer. Video games are a more concentrated form of play than board games. Compared to nature, these pleasure-packed experiences are hard to resist. We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.

If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, you need to make it attractive. Throughout our discussion of the second Law, our goal is to learn how to make our habits irresistible. While it is not possible to transform every habit into a supernormal stimulus, we can make any habit more enticing. To do this, we must start by understanding what a craving is and how it works. We begin by examining a biological signature that all habits share: the dopamine spike.

THE DOPAMINE-DR FEEDBACK LOOP

Scientists can track the precise moment a craving occurs by measuring a neurotransmitter called dopamine. The importance of dopamine became apparent in 1954 when neuroscientists James Olds and Milner conducted experiments that the neurological processes behind craving and desire. By implanting electrodes in the brains of rats, the researchers blocked the release of dopamine. To the surprise of the scientists, the rats lost all will to live. They wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t have sex. They didn’t crave anything. Within a few days, the animals died of thirst.

In follow-up studies, other scientists also inhibited the dopamine-releasing parts of the brain, but this time, they squirted little droplets of sugar into the mouths of the dopamine-depleted rats. Their little rat faces lit up with pleasurable grins from the tasty substance. Even though dopamine was blocked, they liked the sugar just as much as before; they just didn’t want it anymore. The ability to experience pleasure remained, but without dopamine, desire faded. And without desire, action stopped.

When other researchers reversed this process and flooded the brain's reward system with dopamine, animals performed habits at breakneck speed. In one study, mice received a powerful hit of dopamine each time they poked their noses in a box. Within minutes, the mice developed a craving so strong that they began poking their noses into the box eight hundred times per hour. (Humans are not so different: the average slot machine player will spin the wheel six hundred times per hour.)

Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. Every behavior that is highly habit-forming—taking drugs, eating junk food, playing video games, browsing social media—is associated with higher levels of dopamine. The same can be said for our most basic habitual behaviors like eating food, drinking water, having sex, and interacting socially.

For years, scientists assumed dopamine was solely about pleasure, but now we know it plays a central role in many neurological processes, including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion, and voluntary movement.

When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure but also when you anticipate it. Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before they place a bet, not after they win. Cocaine addicts get a surge of dopamine when they see the powder, not after they take it. Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.

It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.

Interestingly, the reward system activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward. This is one reason the anticipation of an experience can often feel better than the attainment of it. As a child, thinking about Christmas morning can be more enjoyable than opening the gifts. As an adult, daydreaming about an upcoming vacation can be more enjoyable than actually being on vacation. Scientists refer to this as the difference between “wanting” and “liking.”

Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them. The wanting centers in the brain are large: the brain stem, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area, the dorsal striatum, the amygdala, and portions of the prefrontal cortex. By comparison, the liking centers of the brain are much smaller. They are often referred to as “hedonic hot spots” and are distributed like tiny islands throughout the brain. For instance, researchers have found that 100 percent of the nucleus accumbens is activated during wanting, while only 10 percent of the structure is activated during liking.

The fact that the brain allocates so much precious space to the regions responsible for craving and desire provides further evidence of the crucial role these processes play. Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.

These insights reveal the importance of the second Law of Behavior Change. We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place. This is where a strategy known as temptation bundling comes into play.

HOW TO USE TEMPTATION BUNDLING TO MAKE YOUR HABITS MORE ATTRACTIVE

Ronan Byrne, an electrical engineering student in Dublin, Ireland, enjoyed watching Netflix, but he also knew that he should exercise more often than he did. Putting his engineering skills to use, Byrne hacked his stationary bike and connected it to his laptop and television. He then wrote a computer program that would allow Netflix to run only if he was cycling at a certain speed. If he slowed down for too long, whatever show he was watching would pause until he started pedaling again. He was, in the words of one fan, “eliminating obesity one Netflix binge at a time.”

Byrne was also employing temptation bundling to make his exercise habit more attractive. Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do. In Byrne’s case, he bundled watching Netflix (the thing he wanted to do) with riding his stationary bike (the thing he needed to do).

Businesses are masters at temptation bundling. For instance, when the American Broadcasting Company, more commonly known as ABC, launched its Thursday-night television lineup for the 2014–2015 season, they promoted temptation bundling on a massive scale. Every Thursday, the company would air three shows created by screenwriter Shonda Rhimes—*Grey’s Anatomy*, *Scandal*, and *How to Get Away with Murder*. They branded it as “TGIT on ABC” (TGIT stands for Thank God It’s Thursday). In addition to promoting the shows, ABC encouraged viewers to make popcorn, drink red wine, and enjoy the evening.

Andrew Kubitz, head of scheduling for ABC, described the idea behind the campaign: “We see Thursday night as a viewership opportunity, with either couples or women by themselves who want to sit down and escape, have fun, drink their red wine, and have some popcorn.” The brilliance of this strategy is that ABC was associating the action they needed viewers to do (watch their shows) with activities their viewers already wanted to do (relax, drink wine, and eat popcorn).

Over time, people began to connect watching ABC with feeling relaxed and entertained. If you drink red wine and eat popcorn at 8 p.m. every Thursday, then eventually “8 p.m. on Thursday” becomes synonymous with relaxation and entertainment. The reward gets associated with the cue, making the habit of turning on the television more attractive. You’re more likely to find a behavior appealing if you can do one of your favorite things at the same time.

For example, you may want to catch up on the latest celebrity gossip but need to get in shape. Using temptation bundling, you could decide to read tabloids or watch reality shows only at the gym. Alternatively, if you want to get a pedicure but need to clean out your email inbox, you might resolve to only get a pedicure while processing overdue work emails.

Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychological theory known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of Professor David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.” In other words, even if you’re not particularly keen on processing overdue work emails, you’ll become conditioned to do it if it means you get to engage in something you really want to do along the way.

You can even combine temptation bundling with the habit stacking strategy we discussed in Chapter 5 to create a set of rules to guide your behavior. The habit stacking + temptation bundling formula is:

1. After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED].

2. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].

Here are a few examples:

- If you want to read the news, but you need to express more gratitude:

1. After I get my morning coffee, I will say one thing I’m grateful for that happened yesterday (need).

2. After I say one thing I’m grateful for, I will read the news (want).

- If you want to watch sports, but you need to make sales calls:

1. After I get back from my lunch break, I will call three potential clients (need).

2. After I call three potential clients, I will check ESPN (want).

- If you want to check Facebook but need to exercise more:

1. After I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees (need).

2. After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook (want).

The hope is that eventually you’ll look forward to calling three clients or doing ten burpees because it allows you to read the latest sports news or check Facebook. By performing the action you need to do, you earn the privilege of engaging in something you want to do.

We began this chapter by discussing supernormal stimuli, which are heightened versions of reality that increase our desire to take action. Temptation bundling is a way to create a heightened version of any habit by connecting it with something you already want. Engineering a truly irresistible habit is a challenging task, but this simple strategy can be employed to make nearly any habit more attractive than it would be otherwise.

Chapter Summary

- The 2nd Law of Behavior Change is to make it attractive.

- The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.

- Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.

- The anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—motivates us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the dopamine spike.

- Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

Atomic Habits Chapter 7

2025-05-08T05:08:00.000-07:00

The Secret to Self-Control

In 1971, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year, Congressmen Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy Illinois made a discovery that stunned the American public. While visiting the troops, they learned that over 15 percent of U.S. soldiers stationed there were heroin addicts. Follow-up research revealed that 35 percent of service members in Vietnam had tried heroin, and as many as 20 percent were addicted—the problem was even worse than they had initially thought.

This discovery led to a flurry of activity in Washington, including the creation of the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention under President Nixon to promote prevention and rehabilitation and to track addicted service members when they returned home. Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers who had been heroin users returned home, only 5 percent of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12 percent relapsed within three years. In other words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight.

This finding contradicted the prevailing view at the time, which considered heroin addiction to be a permanent and irreversible condition. Instead, Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers were surrounded by cues that triggered heroin use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed by the constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who were also heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from home. Once a soldier returned to the United States, however, he found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context changed, so did the habit.

Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean—which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their habit—and then returns to their old neighborhood, where all the previous cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place await. It’s no wonder that typically, you see numbers that are the exact opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Typically, 90 percent of heroin users become re-addicted once they return home from rehab.

The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs about bad habits because they challenged the conventional association of unhealthy behavior with moral weakness. If you’re overweight, a smoker, or an addict, you’ve been told your entire life that it is because you lack self-control—maybe even that you’re a bad person. The idea that a little bit of discipline could solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture.

Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

This counterintuitive idea makes even more sense once you understand what happens when a habit is formed in the brain. A habit that has been encoded in the mind is ready to be activated whenever the relevant situation arises. When Patty Olwell, a therapist from Austin, Texas, started smoking, she would often light up while riding horses with a friend. Eventually, she quit smoking and avoided it for years. She had also stopped riding. Decades later, she hopped on a horse again and found herself craving a cigarette for the first time in forever. The cues were still internalized; she just hadn’t been exposed to them in a long time.

Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change techniques can backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result, many people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating. Showing pictures of blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher levels of anxiety, which drives many people to reach for a cigarette. If you’re not careful about managing cues, you can inadvertently cause the very behavior you want to stop.

Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the energy to do anything else. Worrying about your health makes you feel anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease that anxiety, which in turn makes your health even worse, leaving you feeling more anxious. It’s a downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits.

Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit. Once you notice something, you begin to want it. This process is happening all the time—often without us realizing it. Scientists have found that showing addicts a picture of cocaine for just thirty-three milliseconds stimulates the reward pathway in the brain and sparks desire. This speed is too fast for the brain to consciously register—the addicts couldn’t even tell you what they had seen—but they craved the drug all the same.

Here’s the punch line: you can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy. It is hard to maintain a Zen attitude in a life filled with interruptions; it takes too much energy. In the short run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long run, we become products of the environment that we live in. To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cues that cause it:

- If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in another room for a few hours.

- If you’re continually feeling like you’re not enough, stop following social media accounts that trigger jealousy and envy.

- If you’re wasting too much time watching television, move the TV out of the bedroom.

- If you’re spending too much money on electronics, quit reading reviews of the latest tech gear.

- If you’re playing too many video games, unplug the console and put it in a closet after each use.

This practice is an inversion of the first Law of Behavior Change. Rather than making cues obvious, you can make them invisible. I’m often surprised by how effective simple changes like these can be. Remove a single cue, and the entire habit often fades away.

Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can summon the willpower to override your desires every time. Instead of trying to muster a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.

This is the secret to self-control: make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

Chapter Summary

- The inversion of the first Law of Behavior Change is to make it invisible.

- Once a habit is formed, it is unlikely to be forgotten.

- People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.

- One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.

- Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.