This is normal for me.

Sometimes, people ask, “Tyler, wouldn’t you have more fun traveling if you had someone to go with?”

And my answer is always both yes and no.

Traveling with a friend or someone close can be a really rewarding experience. You don’t truly know someone until you travel with them, and getting to know someone like that can be a lot of fun (or not!).

But I have just as much fun traveling alone. It’s a different experience, but no less enjoyable. When I travel alone, what I learn about is myself. I learn about my own strengths, and I learn about my own weaknesses and insecurities. I’ve never come home from a trip feeling anything less than a better, stronger person.

Traveling isn’t the only time being alone is a valuable experience. It can be powerful in any aspect of life.

The World As An Introvert

It seems today—at least in the U.S.—there must be something wrong with you if you’re alone. We praise the extroverts—those who know how to handle themselves in a crowd, the ones with vast network of friends. We think working in groups and on teams is the only way to find the answer to a problem. That two heads are better than one. That collaboration is the only way of the future.

But the truth is almost half of the world doesn’t agree. I don’t feel that way. Sometimes, the rhetoric gets so loud I wonder what’s wrong with me when I don’t feel like going to parties, or working on big teams, or being the center of attention.

I see my friends going out and wonder what’s wrong with me when I want to stay in. I see them collaborating on business projects together, and wonder if there’s something wrong with me because I prefer to work alone.

But there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m an introvert. And, according to some statistics, there’s about a 50% chance that you are, too.

If you’re an introvert, welcome to the club. There aren’t any meetings because we prefer to work alone, but you can at least take some solace in knowing you’re not the only one who feels the way you do.

For me, being an introvert doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy going out or having friends or being the center of attention once in a while. It only means that it’s not where I get the most value from my life.

Being “turned on” and in social mode is fun for me, but I can only take it in limited quantities. When I organize an event, I purposefully leave my calendar empty the next day because I know I’ll need to rest and recover.

If I’m working on a team, don’t ask me to brainstorm—I won’t come up with anything useful. But if you leave me alone to think awhile, you might be surprised at what I accomplish.

If you want me to come out with you and your friends, invite me somewhere quiet where we can talk. I get value from my relationships by getting to know you much more than just being around you.

And if you’re an extrovert, don’t assume there’s no value in this for you. In the same way I can enjoy myself in a big group, you may find you can also enjoy yourself… all by yourself. There is great value in being alone. And handling it well is a beautiful thing.

At the very least, it’s a useful life skill. You can’t always control when there will be someone there for you, so being able to happily conduct yourself alone is an important part of being alive.

13 Rules For Being Alone And Being Happy About It

The following are 13 rules I try to live by when it comes to being alone. They add enormous value to my life.

Whether you’re an introvert trying to make your way in an extrovert’s world, or an extrovert learning to become better at being on your own, I hope they add some value to your life as well.

1. Understand you’re good enough all by yourself.

You’re a valuable person, and you don’t need the approval of anyone else for that to be true. When you’re alone, remind yourself that it’s because you choose to be. It really is a choice.

It’s very easy to find someone to spend time with, but when you have high standards for the people you allow into your life, you’re telling yourself that you’re better off by yourself than with someone who isn’t a great fit for you.

2. Value others’ opinions, but value your own more.

Don’t ask for advice unless you truly need it. Instead, ask yourself for advice. If you knew the answer to the problem that you have, what would it be?

That’s your answer. The more time you spend asking yourself for advice, the less you start to need input from others. When you trust yourself to solve problems, you become a much stronger and more confident person, and you take on challenges that you wouldn’t have felt capable of before.

3. Learn to be an observer.

I’ve always held the belief that if you aren’t able to take interest in something, it says more about you than whatever it is you find uninteresting.

To truly enjoy being alone, learn to look at ordinary situations in new and unfamiliar ways. Go to the park and watch people play with their children or their dogs. Go to the grocery store and watch how people shop for their groceries.

Everywhere you go, make an effort to understand the other people around you. Learning how people operate when they think no one is watching will make you feel more connected to them.

4. Close your eyes in a dark room and appreciate the silence.

The world is a busy place and, unless you take a moment to step away from it once in a while, it’s easy to forget how nice it is to simply sit alone and enjoy your own company.

Take a moment and sit quietly in a dark room. Listen to everything that is not happening around you. You can learn a lot about yourself in the moments when you’re least occupied—the times when there is nothing to distract you from the thoughts and feelings you deny yourself during your busy days.

5. Learn how to talk to yourself.

They say it’s perfectly normal to talk to yourself; you’re only crazy if you talk back.

Every single person has an inner voice that talks to them at all hours of all days, and getting to know that person and how to talk to them is one of the most important things you can do for yourself.

When you fill your time with other people, it’s easier to ignore this voice, but when you’re alone, it’s your only company. This voice rubs off on you. It is you. The way that you talk to yourself when no one else is around will shape who you are in this world more than anything else.

Just like you’d distance yourself from negative friends who bring you down, it’s just as important to distance yourself from a negative inner voice.

When you’re alone, it can sometimes be hard to stay positive, but you must be kind to yourself.

6. Cherish every interaction.

Most people have to experience some type of tragedy before they begin to understand just how brief our time here is. You get but a few short trips around the sun, and then it’s over.

Time alone is important. Time alone is beautiful. But so is time spent with others.

There is no such thing as a boring person. There is no such thing as a boring situation. If you’re ever bored, it’s because you’re not paying attention. This is a problem with you, not with your surroundings.

Take an interest in every person that comes into your life, even if for only a second. Listen closely to what they say. Watch carefully what they do. Try to understand them as a person. You’ll be better for it.

7. Rearrange your furniture.

When you’re alone, it’s easy to fall into a pattern. It’s easy to stagnate and feel as if things rarely change. And when you’re alone, this is true—things rarely do change unless you make a conscious effort to change them.

The problem is that meaningful change is hard, and what’s hard rarely gets started. To keep things moving, you have to keep things fresh. And to keep things fresh, it’s best to look for small wins that can lead to bigger ones.

Rearranging your furniture is meaningless by itself, but it brings new life to a dull routine, which is easy to fall prey to when you’re spending a lot of time alone.

8. Avoid mindless consumption.

When you’re alone, you have an incredible opportunity to think clearly about your life and the direction you want to take it. In a world that’s often filled with noise, you’ve been given quiet. This is a time to reaffirm the path that your life is on.

Are you happy and fulfilled? Should you keep doing what you’re doing? Or, are you feeling unsatisfied? Should you change something?

These are questions you can only answer when you take advantage of this gift of quiet.  If, instead, you fill your time with entertainment that you mindlessly consume—TV, movies, randomly surfing the web—it will be difficult to answer these questions. You can never devote enough attention to coming to a clear answer.

9. Create, create, create.

To create is one of the most important things you can do in your life. To create among a sea of people (or even just one person) vying for your attention is one of the most difficult things in life.

When you’re alone, the only one stopping you from creating the art, the work, that you’re capable of is yourself. All excuses are gone. When you’re alone, you can lose yourself in your work. When you lose yourself in your work, you can be sure that you’re creating something truly meaningful.

Your other option is to ignore that call to create and, instead, look for temporary comfort in things and people who will eventually leave you unfulfilled. Make use of your loneliness.

10. Make plans for the future, and pursue them immediately.

It’s almost impossible to feel good about your life if you don’t have some type of direction for it. When you meet someone, it’s usually quite easy to see if they have a handle on their life and are happy, or if they’re wandering without aim, looking for something to pursue.

The purpose for your life doesn’t need to be complex or earth shattering. It doesn’t have to be big or overwhelming. It only needs to be present. Once it’s there, it gets much easier to make plans you can take action on.

Pursue these plans immediately. Don’t put them off. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Perfect never comes, and the longer you wait, the harder it is to get started.

Maybe you want to travel the world and understand different cultures. Maybe you want to build a massive stamp collection. It doesn’t matter what it is—pick something you enjoy and go after it.

When you do this, two things happen. First, you gain a sense of confidence in yourself because you see that you’re capable of living on your own terms. Second, this confidence brings new and interesting people into your life.

Being alone can be beautiful, but if you want to add people to your life, finding a purpose for your existence is the fastest way to do it.

11. Go to a movie alone.

Get used to doing things alone that society says is made for two. Go to a movie by yourself and enjoy the picture. Have a great dinner out all by yourself. Take yourself on dates, and learn to treat yourself well.

This will be awkward at first. If you’re used to going out with others, you’ll wonder what you should do with yourself while you’re alone. Don’t try to hide from the discomfort. Accept it. And then laugh about it because, really, who the hell decided that you weren’t supposed to do these things alone?

Besides, to truly enjoy these things with others, you have to learn to enjoy them alone first.

12. Pursue an impractical project.

When you work on a team, the pressure to conform is great. You always have to think about the others in your group and regularly make compromises so that the end result is acceptable to everyone.

In my opinion, this is a terrible way to do something important and personally meaningful.

When you’re alone, you’re free to pursue any kind of project you want in your life. You have the freedom to be completely selfish and make no compromises about what you do or how you do it.

Take advantage of this freedom! An important part of life is doing things that look unwise or impractical to others. Do something that’s completely over your head. Start something that you don’t know how to finish.

Think of the wildest thing you’ve ever wanted to do, then take one small step towards realizing it.

If you’re afraid, understand that this doesn’t have to be your whole life. You can contain it to just a small part. In the piece of your life that you set aside, never, ever allow anyone else’s advice or opinions to direct how you work.

This is something you do alone, for the benefit of no one but yourself.

13. Volunteer your time.

If you’re a hermit when you’re alone, find others that you can be alone around. A great way to do this—and to contribute something positive to the world—is to volunteer your time to a cause you believe in.

Being alone and happy doesn’t mean sequestering yourself from the world. It means being confident enough to know that you can surround yourself with people, but not depend on them for your own happiness.

And one good way to get started is to surround yourself with good people—the kind you’ll find when you give your time to a cause that’s important to you.

And when I went on a little journey to learn more about it (and how to get one o’ them fancy mindsets for myself), what I learned kind of blew my mind… set.

To get you started on your own journey to a growth mindset—which, according to the scientists basically unlocks your full potential as a human—I’ll ask you a question:

When I say Michael Jordan, what comes to mind first?

• Speed?
• Agility?
• Power?
• Raw talent?

You might expect any of those answers. But what about hard work? Did that make your list? And if so, how far down?

When the typical sports fan watches clips of Jordan and sees his career stats, they picture the talent he had to possess to achieve that.

But what does Jordan think about Jordan’s career? If you listen, you’ll hear him say it many times: incredibly hard work is what made him the legacy he is today.

From the outside, his talent looks effortless. But from the inside, apparently, it looks the opposite.

Why did a man who seems to exude raw talent need to work so hard to get where he is? According to him, the hard work is what enabled his talent.

In a 2013 interview w/ Ahmad Rashad, Jordan talks at length about work ethic and how he thinks about his success.

In a seminal moment of the interview, Rashad asks Jordan, “Was fear of failure a motivator?”

And Jordan replies without hesitation. “I never feared about my skills, ya know, because I put in the work. Work ethic eliminates fear.”

Throughout his career, Jordan displayed what psychologists call the “growth mindset”—the belief that effort (not talent) is what generates results.

You can see that mindset at play throughout Jordan’s life, not just during the NBA years. When he moved to baseball, he’d arrive at practice early and hit balls until his hands bled. Today, he works on his businesses—a chain of steakhouses, a car dealership, and an NBA team.

It’s working. He’s worth almost a $1 billion.

If you think you can attribute that much diversity of success to natural talent, you should think again.

According to Jordan, and according to a growing body of research, a growth mindset is what enables that kind of success.

Growth Mindset: What it is and where it came from

The idea that your mindset affects your life is hardly a new one. Many great thinkers, writers, and orators have extolled the virtues of mastering your mind to improve yourself for centuries. No, millenniums.

Basically, think one way, get one result. Think another, get another.

“Your thoughts determine your reality” has been a popular refrain for ages. It sounds good and it feels right, but is it true?

Michael Jordan is just one person on an endless list of anecdotal stories that would say yes.

Unfortunately, anecdotes are unreliable. What we really need is science. Something that puts a stake in the ground and explains why the anecdotes work (and how they can work for us).

Enter Carol Dweck, a professor who’s soft-spoken demeanor and fragile constitution could easily conceal her profound knowledge about the way your mind works if it weren’t for the fact that, when she speaks, her conviction forces you to listen.

And that conviction is well earned. Her decades of research into the way we learn has built a sturdy foundation of empirical evidence that tells that, “yes, your mindset matters!”

That evidence led to her magnum opus, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

It’s a fascinating read, but the crux of it is that you can measure your mindset on a continuum. At one end of the scale is a fixed mindset. At the other end is growth.

What Dweck uncovered is that people on the right (growth mindset) tend to believe their intelligence and their abilities are malleable—that they can change (aka grow) based on how much effort they put into it. They think about their brain like a muscle. If they use it more and challenge it, it will grow stronger.

And those on the left (fixed mindset) consider those things to be set traits, like their eye color or if they have dimples when they smile. If you’re smart, it’s because you were born that way. If you’re talented, the talent comes from your genes. Not much you can do about it either way.

So that’s a simple explanation of the difference between fixed and growth mindset, but why does it actually matter?

What can a growth mindset actually do for you?

The difference between a fixed and growth mindset is simple to understand. You tend to believe you are who you are and there’s not much you can do about it (fixed). Or, you believe you’re in control of who you are, and you can change if you try (growth).

But is one actually better than the other?

According to Dweck, a growth mindset is absolutely better. In almost every way.

What she discovered through a series of experiments and studies is that people with a growth mindset not only learn more new things, but they learn those new things faster and better.

And the long-term outcomes of those findings were crystal clear, too: students with a growth mindset got better grades and ascended to higher levels of achievement later in life. They met more of their goals and stayed on more successful paths.

Why?

Because the mindset you have changes everything about how you approach challenges and opportunities—including whether you use the word “challenge” or “opportunity” for the same circumstance.

In Mindset, Dweck explains that “no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.”

And according to her research, a growth mindset is what motivates you to put in that effort. It’s what makes you dig deep to get through the difficulties of learning something new.

When you believe you’re capable of growing and overcoming obstacles—and that the process can make you smarter, stronger, or better—you feel a lot more motivation to put in the hours of difficult work that will actually get you there.

You’re striving for something you know you can achieve, so you’re at peace with the struggle.

But when you’re stuck in a fixed mindset, you’re exactly that: stuck.

If you can’t grow, if you can’t learn, if you can’t change, why would you bother trying? You don’t think you can do it, and failure would just confirm it.

Would you try to drive your car 300 miles if you only thought you had 100 miles worth of gas in the tank?

Dweck’s research shows that the students she examined were far less likely to even try to learn something new when they showed signs of a fixed mindset. And when they did try, they didn’t try as hard or for as long.

Here’s what Dweck said in Mindset:

In the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail—or if you’re not the best—it’s all been wasted. The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful.

And when you think about it, we all start our lives with an intense growth mindset. That should make it easy and natural to be a growth oriented person. Yet, all of us—at least occasionally—struggle with a fixed mindset.

Again, from Dweck:

What on earth would make someone a nonlearner? Everyone is born with an intense drive to learn. Infants stretch their skills daily. Not just ordinary skills, but the most difficult tasks of a lifetime, like learning to walk and talk. They never decide it’s too hard or not worth the effort. Babies don’t worry about making mistakes or humiliating themselves. They walk, they fall, they get up. They just barge forward. What could put an end to this exuberant learning? The fixed mindset. As soon as children become able to evaluate themselves, some of them become afraid of challenges. They become afraid of not being smart. I have studied thousands of people from preschoolers on, and it’s breathtaking how many reject an opportunity to learn.

So, if you want to improve your life and take more control over what you achieve, then it’s clear that a growth mindset is going to be a lot more useful than a fixed one.

Do you have a growth mindset?

You probably already have a sense of which side of the spectrum you’re on. But if you’re not certain, here’s a quick, 3-question survey that will give you a (rough) idea of whether you have more of a fixed or growth mindset.

Let’s look at those questions in a little more detail.

1. Do you think you “are who you are” and that won’t change? Or do you think you improve as you learn more?

If you think of yourself—your intelligence and your abilities—as something you don’t have control over, you lean towards a fixed mindset.

But if you believe you can change your intelligence and abilities (either by trying hard and growing or by giving up and losing them), then you lean towards a growth mindset.

2. If you aced a difficult test, which of these compliments from your family or friends would be most satisfying to you?

(a) You’re so smart!
(b)You worked really hard!

If you chose a, you lean towards a fixed mindset. If you chose b, you trend towards a growth mindset.

People with a fixed mindset value their natural talents above their efforts, so it will be more satisfying to be complimented for being smart.

But people who hold a growth mindset take pride in their hard work more than their natural gifts, so a compliment that notes their effort would be the most encouraging.

3. When you don’t understand something, do you tend to ask more or fewer questions about it?

If you ask more questions, that indicates you have more of a growth mindset. It shows an interest in a subject you don’t fully understand, and that interest comes from a desire to learn—a characteristic of those who aim to grow.

If you ask fewer questions, it indicates you have more of a fixed mindset. You may be less interested in unfamiliar topics, or you may feel some fear about showing others that you don’t know as much as them about something. That’s a characteristic of those who see themselves as fixed.

Take the average of the 3 answers above, and that’s a rough indication of whether you have more of a fixed or growth mindset.

Is a growth mindset really that simple?

Yep, it really is!

Where it gets a little more nuanced is judging your own mindset in the day-to-day.

According to Dweck, it’s important to understand that the fixed-growth mindset continuum really is a continuum. Some people will fall all the way to one end or the other.

Someone like Michael Jordan will believe they’re capable of learning and excelling at anything. They have super-growth mindsets. And others, like your lazy, whiny cousin in Denver can’t imagine their life going any other direction than the one it’s going now. God forbid they ever change that by trying something different. They have a super-fixed mindset.

The rest of us fall somewhere in the middle. We usually fall on one side or the other.

And while you have an overall mindset, you might find that it’s wildly different around different topics or under different circumstances.

You might think of yourself as the most capable chef on Earth while simultaneously seeing yourself as the most hopelessly clumsy golfer.

That’s normal. And if you find yourself in that situation, the prescription is simple:

If you generally fall towards the fixed end of the spectrum, you need to work to move over to the growth end—even if just a little bit.

If you generally fall on the growth side, you should work to get closer to the furthest end so that you can bring those thought patterns into all areas of your life.

And if you struggle with a fixed mindset in one particular area, then that is the place you must apply the most effort to improve.

So, where do you fall?

And what if you don’t have that coveted growth mindset? Can you develop one?

Yep, you can.

How to Develop Your Growth Mindset

This is where we make some real progress.

Now you know what a growth mindset is, what it can do for you, and whether or not you’ve got one.

But it can be frustrating to understand all that and still not know what to do to actually develop it in yourself.

Let’s fix that.

When you’re confronting your fixed mindset, it can feel like you don’t have any point of reference for how to change it. There’s nothing you can do. (That’s the pitfall of the fixed mindset, after all!)

In reality, there is something you can do.

You can scavenge your brain and create a list (even if it’s short) of areas in your life where you already have a growth mindset.

The goal is to look for times when you learned something and it made you better. That’s a perfect example of the growth mindset at work, and every one of us—including you—have experienced it.

Maybe you’ve always struggled with math and you tell yourself that’s just you. You’re bad with numbers.

But then you remember you picked up a new skill at work—maybe learning how to manage a project or do budget forecasting or… whatever—really quickly. You’d never used that skill before, but you put in some effort and you learned. Now it’s easy.

Personally, I hold a growth mindset in many areas of my life. I love the effort of learning, and I use it to pick up new skills regularly.

But one place I still struggle is with relationships. I’m very introverted and connection has never been effortless for me. When I experience a failure, sometimes I’ll go pretty hard on myself. I’ll say, “Tyler, you’re just not a relationship person. It’s not for you.”

That’s dangerous! Mostly because it’s not true, and I have proof. There are so many areas of my life where I can see that I’ve had to struggle to learn what feels effortless today. Learning relationships is no different.

When I remind myself I’ve learned other difficult things before and I can see my progress in relationships over time, it helps reinforce the growth mindset that I need to keep developing to make more progress.

Let’s put this “growth mindset” stuff to work right now.

Alright, let’s take everything you just learned and make it immediately useful.

Start by thinking of a goal you’d like to accomplish.

Make it a small one you could complete in the next few days. And make it something you feel like you should be able to do, but you can’t right now. Or you haven’t really tried yet.

Your mindset towards this goal has almost certainly held you back from making that initial effort.

Maybe you’ve told yourself that it just isn’t in you to do it, or you’re not able to find the time to make it happen.

Take a moment to speak to yourself as if you were approaching this goal from a growth mindset—that if you make the time to learn and put in the effort, you will be able to achieve it.

Think of yourself as your own teacher encouraging you to take on a new learning challenge.

And the way I want you to do that is by reminding yourself of examples (the more recent the better) where you achieved something difficult by working hard for it.

Make a list. It’s really motivating.

Finally, choose one small thing to do (today!) that will move you one step closer to achieving that personal goal. Commit to putting at least 20 minutes of effort towards it.

When you finish, give yourself a compliment, and make it specific. Praise yourself for doing the work.

Let’s see where that gets you.

I can hardly remember what my mornings look like these days. It’s taken years and much trial and error, but I have a routine now that needs no thought to be completed. Each action, all morning long, is pre-scripted, memorized, and controlled by habit.

I wake up and put my running clothes on. A 5-mile run leads to a shower, breakfast, and then my most important task of the day.

The same thing happens, like clockwork, every… single… day.

What I—and many others, perhaps yourself—have constructed is what I like to call a habit ladder—an automatic system that quickly transforms you from a heap of unconsciousness to a productive human being.

A morning routine is just one example of a habit ladder, though. The same concept can be applied across every aspect of your life to make the important actions you want to take quick and painless. And the trick isn’t so much in what you do, but the order you do them in.

The Loop: How A Habit Works

Why do you bite your fingernails without thinking? Get distracted from important work? Eat poorly? Likewise, why do you exercise without the slightest protest? Get your hardest work done first? Floss your teeth every day?

The answer is you’ve built a habit—an mini-system that, once created, you no longer think about. It’s your brain’s way of offloading all the work required to get through the day.

And a lot of smart researchers—particularly a group from MIT—have figured out how your brain builds a habit. They call it the habit loop ¹, and it works like this:

Take flossing, for example. It’s a habit I implemented after the 25th scolding by my dentist.

At the beginning of every habit is a cue. This is the thing that tells your brain, “Okay, it’s time to start this habit loop.” For me, the cue that it’s time to floss is when I’ve finished brushing my teeth.

Once your brain spots a cue, you go into autopilot; you’re driven by your routine rather than conscious thought. I go directly from brushing my teeth to rolling a waxed string around my fingers without a pause.

And every habit ends with a reward—the reason you’re driven by the cue and routine in the first place. For me, it’s the release of tension knowing my teeth won’t fall out of my head.

Charles Duhigg explains the ins and outs of the habit loop in detail in his bestselling book, The Power of Habit.

Understanding this will help you identify and alter your existing habits, but there’s another tool you can use to help you create new ones faster.

Habit Ladder: Stacking Your Habits For Better Results

Cementing a new habit is hard, but you probably have a few that came naturally. Take a hard look at those easy habits and ask yourself, “What was it that made them so easy to pick up?”

When I look at my own morning routine it’s glaringly obvious. Each habit came easily because the beginning of one is triggered by the end of another.

1. When I wake up, that’s a cue to put on clothes.
2. I choose to put on my running clothes rather than work clothes, and that’s my cue to go outside and start running.
3. When I finish running, I’m sweaty, which cues my shower and, by the time I’m out of the shower, I’m ravenous for breakfast which is my cue to eat.
4. Since I’ve just exercised, my body wants a healthy meal rather than sugary breakfast cereal, so I eat a clean meal.
5. Finally, the energy boost from breakfast and endorphins from running give me exactly what I need to tackle my hardest work first thing in the morning.

This is called a habit ladder because, from the time I wake up to finishing my first work task of the day, I’m climbing up one rung at a time. Each new step is reached because of the last.

Notice from my example, it’s not always the reward from a habit loop that triggers the next. Sometimes it’s a tangential result.

The reward from running isn’t “doing better work.” It’s a feeling of accomplishment for my health. But the runner’s high I get as a tangential result boosts me through those few hours of early morning work.

The habit ladder doesn’t just apply to a morning routine, or even just one day. I also use it in my writing tasks where each one I complete to finish an article spurs me on to the next.

You could also use it to set yourself up early in the week for actions you know you’ll want to take later but will be worn out if you don’t put the triggers in place now.

If you’re working to cement new habits ² but having a hard time, it could have less to do with the habits themselves and more to do with how they’re arranged. Try looking at each from a perspective of the habit loop—cue, routine, reward—and find opportunities to rearrange them so the reward—or tangential result—from one helps to create the cue for the next.

That’s how success becomes automatic all day long.³

On my running routes, there are a few folks—the regulars—I can always count on seeing. We don’t know each other, but we wave and say “hi.” I like to add, “Enjoy the run!” for good measure. “Thanks, I always do!” is a typical reply.

I was talking to a friend about exercise recently. It can be so hard to get into any kind of rhythm.

Productive routines are difficult to build. You want to be more reliable and accountable to yourself, but it’s damn hard to make the time in your busy life.

You might try a few routines at home or at work you think are productive, but they don’t stick. So, you decide you just don’t like them. Routines don’t work for you.

That reminded me of those daily micro-exchanges:

“Enjoy the run!”
“l always do!”

They aren’t just a formality. My trail buddies and I really do enjoy running. And the reason we enjoy it is because our motivation to do it comes from inside of us.

If you’ve ever struggled to stick to a routine, the solution could be as simple as channeling your motivation from the right source. Here’s how to do it.

Internal Vs. External Motivation

Talk to someone who works with drug rehab patients, and you’ll hear the same wisdom shared over and over: “Success depends on your motivations.”

A professional can instantly tell if their patient will get clean and stay that way. Everyone who overcomes a drug addiction is motivated, but the ones who succeed long-term are the ones who are motivated for the right reasons.

So what are the right reasons?

Research shows rehab success lasts when patients are motivated to make themselves better… for themselves.

Some people go to rehab because they’re afraid they’ll lose their job, their house, or their family. These patients might get clean, but it rarely lasts. Others go to rehab because they fear they’ll lose themselves. These are the people who turn their lives around for good. ⁴

That example illustrates the difference between internal and external motivation.

When you’re externally motivated to change, the things that drive that change are outside of you and, therefore, outside of your control. For an addict in rehab, it could be the loss of a relationship, a job, or something else.

For you, trying to build routines to save time or improve yourself, the motivation could be similar. Maybe your partner has been nagging at you to get healthier, so you try to build a fitness routine. Or maybe your boss mentioned you’re not as productive as you should be, so you’re trying to organize yourself at work.

The data says that, if these are your motivations, your efforts probably won’t work. You’ll get started. But when things get difficult, you’ll give up. And things always get difficult before they become easy.

External factors change, you can’t control them, and trying to keep up with them proves useless over time.

But when you’re internally motivated, you’re driven by a desire to make yourself better.

You’re only accountable to you, and that means you control the variables that decide whether you succeed or fail. When those factors are stacked in your favor, the odds say you’ll make lasting change.

Internal Motivations Create Sustainable Routines

What’s more interesting: the external motivations that drive you are often better satisfied when you ignore them and focus on finding your internal motivations and acting on them instead.

Consider an example. Let’s say you’ve been told by your boss that you don’t contribute enough to your team brainstorming sessions. You’re too quiet, and it’s going to keep you from getting promoted.

If pleasing your boss and being promoted are your primary motivations to improve, you’re going to struggle. You’ll take the feedback and try to speak up at team meetings. But it’ll feel unnatural and you won’t express yourself well.

This is the folly of external motivation. You’re allowing someone else to determine what’s good for you and taking actions to fix it for them. That’s not sustainable.

But what if you took that feedback and looked a little deeper? Maybe you have a real desire to be influential, and that feedback from your boss shows you that you’re not rallying your team like you could be.

That line of thinking—focusing on an internal motivation—will lead you to different solutions to the same problem. Maybe you’ll make more time to have one-on-one conversations with your teammates or build a routine of reaching out to your colleagues via email or chat to discuss ideas as they come up.

These routines will be sustainable because you built them from a desire to please yourself instead of someone else.

And, at the end of the day, your boss and your coworkers are going to get what they need as well.

Strategies to Inspire Your Own Internal Motivation

Let’s face it. We’re all externally motivated to some degree.

If you struggle to build systems and routines that will become a part of your life and produce the lasting changes you hope for, the trick is to tilt the scale just a little. Find the internal motivations that will produce those external results.

Here are a few things you can try that have worked well for me and millions of others who enjoy the benefits of reliable routines:

Focus on change you feel instead of change you see.

Exercise and health are a good example. Everyone wants to look great, but the only reason to look great is so that others will like what they see.

If you want to improve your appearance, go a little deeper.

Instead of making your looks the prime motivator, focus on increasing your strength, becoming more agile, and building more stamina. These are things you actually control. As those metrics improve, so will your appearance.

Only do what you enjoy.

The idea that you can do something you hate over and over until you like it is a fairy tale in most cases (read on to learn when it isn’t).

You might succeed at first, but it’s excruciating. And the resentment that slowly builds will eventually cause you to fail. You’ll lose the progress you made.

Instead, have the discipline to only focus on doing things you enjoy that will also produce the results you want. This is what it looks like to be true to yourself.

Consider the example from earlier—the quiet employee who needs to become more influential to move up in their company.

There’s a swimming pool’s worth strategies and tactics they could try, but long-term success comes when they find the teaspoon of strategies that are the perfect fit for them.

When you start a routine, don’t give up for at least 30 days.

When I started running, I didn’t like it that much. I was overweight, out of shape, and not very good at it.

But I wanted to give it a fair trial, so I stuck with it for a few months. Tens of thousands of miles later, it’s one of my favorite activities.

Don’t give up on something important to you just because you’re not good at it. And don’t convince yourself that you don’t like it until you’ve become proficient and still don’t like it.

It’s hard to like something you’re not good at. It’s not much fun until you know what you’re doing. If you commit to trying something new for at least 30 days, your skill will improve. As you improve, you might learn you actually like it.

Focus on consistency, not results.

You have more control over how often you do something than the results you get from doing it. And results come from consistency, not the other way around.

These are the primary factors in building a routine that is a natural part of your life instead of one you struggle to implement over and over.

When you let your internal motivations guide you, the results you get won’t just be better, they’ll be more fulfilling.

You probably don’t realize as you’re doing it—I don’t—but every day you quietly judge the people you meet. You look for clues that will tell you what type of person they are, if they’re confident in themselves, and whether you can trust them.

And everyone you meet is doing the same to you.

Have you ever met someone a few times and thought, “I really should like this person… but I don’t.” That’s the first impression at work.

Something about the way they presented themselves to you in the first few moments of meeting triggered a negative response from your subconscious brain and, try as you might, you can’t shake it.

As you’ve probably heard at some point in a fight with a loved one, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. The majority of the communication you have with the people around you is non-verbal—your body language. And you’d hardly be alone if you don’t have a clue what it’s saying most of the time.

Today, that changes. And your relationships change with it.

How A First Impression Can Change Your Life

Recent research has shown you actually can change a first impression, but it’s incredibly hard and it takes a long time.⁵

When you meet someone, you create a rule in your brain for them.

If it’s negative, you might say, “Joe is mean.” From there on out, Joe is mean always. At least in your mind. If you see Joe again at a party and realize he’s actually a nice guy, you will register that. But instead of changing the rule, your brain builds an exception. “Joe is nice… at parties. He’s mean everywhere else.”

If Joe just met you on a bad day and is actually a good guy, he’ll have to spend a lifetime building up a series of exceptions to your rule.

I can see this at work in my life. I have friends of friends that I’m happy to be around in certain situations, but plenty of others where I’d rather not see them. Logically, if my friends (who I think are great) think someone else is great, I should probably agree with them. But that’s not how the brain works.

If you can hang onto an undeserved bad impression, though, you can also hang onto a good one, believing someone is great even though they’ve demonstrated over and over they aren’t simply because you saw their bright side at the beginning.

That’s how people end up staying in terrible relationships and why you have that “one friend” you always have to apologize for.

Whatever the case, you see how important it is to make a good first impression. Whatever impression you make on someone, you’ll spend a lifetime building exceptions to their rule, but never changing it. So why not make a great one from the start? Life will be a lot easier.

The million dollar question, of course, is “How do you do that?” Glad you asked.

The Ingredients Of A Great First Impression

Hundreds of studies have been done on human relationships and forming impressions. The intricacies of the science are many, but there are a few things almost all the research has agreed works, like some sort of magic spell, to cement a good impression of you in the eyes of the people you meet.

You’ll notice many of them are correlated with displaying high self-confidence.

1. Strong (but not too strong) eye contact.

One of the most intimate things everyone will notice about you is your eyes. More specifically, your eye contact. The way you look at someone when you meet will instantly convey significant information about you. And, according to the research, strong eye contact = good.

In fact, at least 12 different studies have found job candidates who made strong, lasting eye contact when meeting their interviewer were judged higher and offered jobs more often.⁶

This is because eye contact is viewed as a sign of self-confidence, and that triggers the brain’s trust response.

But eye contact can also be tricky. You want to look people in the eye, but you don’t want to stare at them. Staring is universally seen as aggressive. The best thing to do is to look someone in the eye when you greet them and then return regularly to short but noticeable lengths of eye contact.

Don’t try to hold eye contact through a full conversation. That would be weird.

2. Firm handshake.

A study in 2008 of the effect of handshakes on employability found people who had stronger handshakes were seen as more favorable candidates for a job because they came across more confident and trustworthy.⁷

Another study at Ohio Wesleyan University identified three factors of what actually makes for a good handshake:⁸

1. Firm. A good handshake should be firm, but not hand-crushing.
2. Warm. A warm hand signals a warm personality and a cold one signals a cold personality. That’s ridiculous, but it’s how our brains operate—by association.
3. Dry. A dry hand means you’re not sweaty or clammy. Not being sweaty means you’re calm. And being calm indicates confidence.

Before you shake someone’s hand, warm it up, dry it off on your clothes, and remember to squeeze.

3. A voice of authority.

Here’s an interesting thing about humans: our voices change predictably as we enter high or low-power scenarios.⁹ So, what makes for a confident tone of voice? The research says it’s a bit lower, less singsongy, and more dynamic (a greater range of loud and quiet).

For an example, check out this recording of Margaret Thatcher early in her career:

And this one after she took speech coaching to sound more authoritative:

4. Similar dress.

This is where a lot of typical advice gets it wrong. Read almost any style or career article, and the advice is to “dress to impress”—put on the best clothes you’ve got to make a good impression. The reality is not so true.

Dressing well can give you the perception of authority (which is useful in many situations), but it won’t necessarily help you make a great first impression.

So what does? The science says it’s dressing similarly to the person you’re meeting.¹⁰

When it comes to making a warm and welcoming first impression, people want to know that you’re like them, not better than them. One of the quickest ways to tell is to look at the clothes you wear.

5. Good hygiene (in some situations).

This is another place where the generic advice columns often get it slightly wrong. They say to always keep yourself as clean as possible. It’s not bad advice—you’ll do better keeping yourself neat than you will otherwise, but the truth is the importance of hygiene for a good impression is actually situation dependent.

Here’s what we know:

1. It’s important to keep your home clean. People with clean homes are viewed as more agreeable, conscientious, and intelligent.¹¹
2. You can get away with being a little slovenly, but only if you speak eloquently.¹²
3. The cleanliness of your mouth is super-important (especially if you’re speaking with the opposite sex).¹³

The best advice is to keep yourself clean—particularly your mouth and your home (if you’re having guests over)—but you may be forgiven if you hit the other points well.

6. Open posture.

The way you stand will play a part in how you’re perceived.

Researchers at the University of Texas found that people can very accurately guess nine different personality traits about you just by the way you hold your body.¹⁴

Standing in an open, relaxed posture—chin up, arms at your side, back straight—signal that you’re a warm and friendly person.

When you hunch over or make yourself small, you invite the subconscious of the person you’re meeting to wonder if you lack confidence or have something to hide.

If you have the habit of folding your arms or hunching, a quick way to check yourself is to focus on taking deep breaths into your stomach. Your stomach will comfortable expand when you’re standing tall and open.

If you notice any discomfort or that your stomach is hitting your arms as you breath, that’s your queue to straighten yourself out.

30-Second Recap

Now you understand six of the most studied characteristics of making a great first impression. There was a lot to learn and you’re probably asking, “Okay, that’s great. But how am I supposed to remember all this every time I meet someone?”

You really don’t have to remember that much and, if you keep it front of mind for even a week, you’ll start to internalize many of these actions.

To recap:

First impressions are made almost instantly, and they stick for a lifetime (but you can slowly alter them). To make the best first impression in almost any situation, you’ll want to:

1. Make eye contact, but don’t stare.
2. Shake with a firm, warm, and dry hand.
3. Make your voice more authoritative.
4. Dress similarly to the person you’re meeting.
5. Keep yourself tidy (especially your teeth)
6. Stand tall with an open posture.

Now go get ’em, Tiger. The world is your oyster.

“When I go to a baseball game, I can eat six, maybe seven hot dogs. I love hot dogs more than anything on Earth.”

This is the opening line from Mr. Hourigan, my high school Economics teacher. We’re learning the law of diminishing returns.

He goes on to explain how, though his love for brats runs deeper than human understanding, he starts to get tired of them after a while. Sure, each of those first three dogs make him happier and happier. Eventually, though, the next one isn’t quite as tasty as the last. After about six hot dogs, Mr. Hourigan hardly cares about hot dogs at all.

Admittedly, a strange comparison. Also an effective way to share a complex idea with a bunch of apathetic high schoolers.

The law of diminishing returns, put simply, describes how you can’t achieve endless efficiency in any system. More workers on a construction project won’t always make it finish faster. Speeding up an assembly line won’t guarantee you more widgets in an hour.

As a 17-year-old student, I didn’t care about construction projects or assembly lines. I didn’t care about hot dogs either, but I was intimately familiar with them. I knew if I ate too many, I wouldn’t like them as much. And Mr. Hourigan knew that’s all I needed to understand to get the lesson.

He compared something I already understood to something I didn’t and, suddenly, I understood it, too. It’s called schema learning, and it’s a well-documented educational tool.

You’re (probably) not an economics teacher. What you are, though, is someone with important ideas that need to be communicated effectively. You want to educate people, and you want to lead them to make smart decisions.

So, it’s critical you understand how to communicate your ideas using schema learning because there is no better tool to not only educate someone quickly but also persuade them to make smart decisions and accept good advice.

The Simple Science Of Schemas

Let’s play a quick game. Say the word “cat” out loud. Now, say the next word that immediately comes to mind after cat. Do this two or three more times. Here’s what I came up with (strange it may be):

1. Cat
2. Cheetah
3. Police
4. Detention

What you’ve just done is an exercise in free association. Each word is, in some way, connected—at least in your brain—to the one before it.

I said “cheetah” because it’s a type of cat. I said “police” because cheetahs run fast and police are who I’ll deal with if I drive too fast. Police can put you in jail and that reminds me of my time in lock-up, aka “detention,” in high school.

Your brain builds all kinds of literal and abstract connections between the things you know and understand. There’s no single way from one part of your brain to another. The more distinct pieces of knowledge you have, the more opportunities you have to make connections to new ones.

Those connection opportunities are what allow you to learn new concepts faster and recall them easier. This is the basis of schema learning. It’s why making the comparison between eating hot dogs at a baseball game and factory workers on an assembly line makes perfect sense instead of sounding crazy.

When you’re sharing something new with someone, the more potential connections you can make to something they already know, the better shot they’ll have at retaining it.

For example, you could teach:

• Geometry by relating it to how you’ll fit furniture in a living room
• How to fix your smart phone by comparing it to troubleshooting a computer
• Economics by eating hot dogs, naturally

If you want to teach people something complex, lead them through a difficult problem, or win them over to your way of thinking, there are some smart ways to implement schema learning to help you do just that.

Making Ideas Stick With Schemas

Harnessing schema learning isn’t just for the traditional teacher. It’s useful in many scenarios in your life. You can use it to:

• Explain how something works to someone who doesn’t understand (peer teaching)
• Convey an important message to people who need to hear it (public speaking / leadership)
• Get someone to understand and accept your point of view (persuasion)

The uses for schema learning are many, and it’s been heavily studied. Here are the top four strategies I repeatedly bumped into when reviewing the research around how to best harness the power of schemas.

1. Make it personal.

I once tried to explain WordPress (the software that runs this website) to an older friend by comparing it to Microsoft Word “but for the Internet.”

It wasn’t a great comparison in the first place, but it really didn’t work when I learned the guy had never used Word before. I failed at teaching because I wrongly assumed what my student already knew.

Not everyone knows the same things, so finding schemas that work for most people is critical. When you tap into a concept they’re deeply familiar with, learning becomes nearly automatic.

How do you discover what someone already knows? A little sleuthing is in order.

When you have something important to share, be ready with several different schemas. Poll your audience to find what they’re already familiar with and build from there.

When I asked my friend, “What do you do when you want to write something you want others to read?” he said, “I type it out and have my son send it to the newspaper.” Whoa. I immediately adjusted my schema to fit that.

2. Activate prior knowledge.

Schema learning works best when you’re not the one doing the work.

For success, make the learner build the connection. To do that, ask lots of questions that activate their existing knowledge so they can build the mental bridge from one to the other.

This tactic is not just for teaching, though. It’s deadly effective for persuasion.

For years, there’s been debate raging about global warming and its effect on the planet. According to basically all established science, it’s real and it’s bad. Yet there’s a vocal minority who refuse to accept it and, instead, try to persuade others to accept their argument.

A good (albeit sad) example of this is when US Rep. Steve Stockman uses the schema of ice melting in water to explain why there’s no reason to worry about the sea level rising:

The problem, of course, is the schema is wrong. It doesn’t reflect reality. But people who follow Rep. Stockman and aren’t interested in physics probably won’t catch that.

How do you show someone who uses that argument that their science is wrong? Just explaining it probably won’t do the trick. Comedian Jon Stewart from The Daily Show found an effective way:

Stewart uses the same schema as Rep. Stockman, but he updates it with a critical addition to show how global warming actually works.

Everyone has drunk a glass of ice water before, so their existing knowledge is immediately activated and the demonstration forces you to accept it as the truth.

3. Ask for more examples.

When you were a kid, your teachers probably asked you to create your own explanations for how things work.

I remember a lesson from high school calculus about calculating the swing of a pendulum. Math has never been my strength, but I always grasped it when I could clearly connect it to a real world scenario I understood.

In this case, our teacher was using the swing of the pendulum on a grandfather clock to illustrate. But it wasn’t hitting home. We all knew what grandfather clocks were and that their time was kept by a pendulum. But we didn’t care. We were 17-year-olds and it was the 21st century. Grandfather clocks were irrelevant 100 years ago.

The teacher noticed we weren’t engaged and asked a smart question: “Where else does this apply?” Someone said construction cranes. Another said playground swings.

Not only were we showing our teacher we understood (and strengthening our connection to the lesson) by coming up with more schemas, we instantly became more engaged because she allowed us to find an application for it that we cared about. Not that swings are that special to me, but they were more interesting than a grandfather clock at the time.

If you’ve ever struggled to communicate something that feels like it should be important but no one seems to care, there’s a lesson here: You’re not connecting it to something that matters to your audience.

4. Check for mastery.

When I started my first real job in college, I’d taken a class on how to create a construction schedule—what contractors to schedule at what times and when to do which types of work. I thought I understood it. Then, I created a schedule for a real project.

Sitting down with the superintendent, we mapped out the plan to remodel part of a hospital. Everything was going great. Then, two weeks in, something went wrong and the project came to a grinding halt. I was unprepared and had no idea what to do—I didn’t plan for the plan not working!

Read next: Art Forgery And What It Takes To Master A Skill

When you’re trying to make a message stick, a schema will plant the seed. But what makes that seed grow is when the person it’s stuck in can build on it themselves to become a master.

Your job isn’t really done until you’ve left someone with the ability to take what you’ve showed them and turn it into something of their own. This is how ideas not only stick, but grow, and lessons aren’t just understood but embraced.

The question is, how do you know when you’ve reached that level? How to test to be sure? Put it to use in real life.

Everything is difficult until you find a practical application for it. You can tell someone has grasped your teaching when they’re able to put it to use because there are always complications that come from real-world use that you can’t account for on paper.

Mastery comes when you can solve problems you didn’t expect.

I couldn’t solve our scheduling dilemma because I’d never faced a problem like that before. But these kinds of problems are actually very common in the construction world and the superintendent knew exactly what to do.

You can teach almost anyone the basics of anything, but you’ll take your mission further when you give people real problems to solve. That’s when you see if everything they’ve learned can actually be applied. That’s when you know the knowledge you’ve transferred is no longer at risk of being lost.

Do This In The Next 10 Minutes

If you want to teach something, convey an important message, or persuade someone to believe what you believe, schema learning is one of the fastest and most effective ways to do it.

Here’s a recap of what you should focus on as you incorporate schemas into your own work:

1. Make it personal. Don’t assume anyone knows anything. Cater your schemas to knowledge the person you’re teaching already has a good grasp on.
2. Activate prior knowledge. Your message will sink in when it can be deeply connected to what’s already understood.
3. Ask for more examples. Your message will stick when there are multiple paths to remembering it.
4. Check for mastery. Your message will grow stronger when the people using it can adjust it to work in many real-world conditions.

Ask yourself these questions to clarify your message and make it stronger when you share it:

• What is the overarching message I want to lead people to?
• What are some common knowledge examples (schemas) I can compare it to?
• What are the specific connections I can use to show the comparison?
• How can I check for mastery?

Practice these principles and your message will spread far.¹⁵ ]]> https://www.riskology.co/schema-learning/feed/ 1 6253 https://www.riskology.co/decision-automation/ https://www.riskology.co/decision-automation/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2015 15:47:26 +0000 https://www.riskology.co/?p=6274 The gist: When you automate decisions that don’t matter, your willpower increases and you get incredibly good at making decisions that actually make a difference.

You’re sitting at work when the phone rings. You’ve been waiting for this call. You don’t know what the person on the other side will say, but you know there’s a big opportunity on the line—one that could change your life, skyrocket your career, improve your family.

But there’s also a risk involved. If you say yes, it could go wrong, even if the odds are slim.

Now, a question: What’s the best time of day to make this decision?

Funny question, right? Why would it matter? There’s a great opportunity. Just a slight risk. Won’t you make the right choice regardless when you’re asked? Most research says no.

In reality, you’re faced with all kinds of decisions daily:

• What time should I get out of bed?
• How much should I save for retirement?
• When should I feed the cat?
• Do my toes look funny?
• Should I get married?
• So on and so forth…

Individually, these questions aren’t hard to answer—even the deeper, more involved ones can be simple to decide. But, together, the sum is greater than the parts. If you ask yourself all these questions at the same time, you’ll melt down. It’ll be a terrible, draining day.

You’d experience, as the experts call it, decision fatigue—the inability to make a smart, rational choice after having to make others before it.¹⁶

But you’re a leader, aren’t you? You want to be, at least. You have lots of decisions to make each day, and how you decide them will have a big impact not just on your life, but the lives around you. People are counting on you to make good choices. Are you making the best ones possible on the decisions that matter?

The bad news is you probably aren’t—at least not all the time. But the good news is you can do something about it—and quickly—to fix the problem.

By the time you finish reading this, you’ll have already fundamentally improved your ability to make smart decisions about life’s biggest choices.

How Your Willpower Withers

How do you decide whether someone should spend their life free or locked up in prison?

You and I are unlikely to ever need to answer such a delicate question, but parole judges have to answer it many times every day. Someone made a mistake years ago, they’ve done some time, and now a judge decides if they’re fit to be free or if they should head back to the slammer.

The judge will look at many details.

• What was the crime?
• How long did they serve?
• How was their behavior?
• What do the psychological experts think?

All these factors are compiled, carefully combed over, and decided upon by someone sworn to uphold the laws of the land. Then, they make a tough decision.

That is, unless the judge had a busy morning and hasn’t had lunch yet. Then, you can pretty much count on them throwing out the process and sending people back to prison—the safe choice.

Even judges—the ultimate arbiters of justice—fall victim to decision fatigue.¹⁷ They lack the willpower to do the right thing under the wrong conditions, just like the rest of us.

Why? Because willpower is limited.¹⁸

Making good choices requires lots of willpower and you don’t have enough of it to make the right ones all day long.

Read next: Endless Willpower From A Spoonful Of Honey

For most of us, there’s a finite number of decisions we can “get right” each day. So, deciding which ones to make today is critical. 

When you consider how bad we are at prioritizing big things in the future (Shouldn’t I save some money for retirement?) and how good we are at overdramatizing the trivial matters of the day (Does this tie go with my suit?), it’s a wonder we make any good decisions at all.

If you have a big vision for the future that requires lots of willpower and focus, how will you succeed when “Should I wear a red shirt?” gets the same priority in your brain as “How should I launch this new program?”

Surprise: you won’t. But you can if you’re willing to do a little work right now to make good choices easier.

If / Then Decision Making: 5 Strategies to Automate Success

You have a lot of decisions to make each day and not a lot of energy to make them with.

Our brains do us no favors helping to rank what’s important in the moment, so how do you make sure the important decisions get the bulk of your attention and you don’t drain your willpower to make good choices before they arrive?

The simplest answer is to make important decisions in the morning.

But it’s an imprecise tool. There are all kinds of unimportant decisions you have to make every morning…

• Should I eat breakfast?
• What color pants should I wear?
• Should I workout this morning?

…before you’re ready to make important ones.

And you don’t always know when you’ll face a critical decision. If a life-altering opportunity comes your way at 4pm, will you be ready to act on it? What if the entire SpongeBob SquarePants DVD collection goes on sale? Will you know what to do?

The other downside is it doesn’t solve the problem of too many decisions and too little willpower to make them.

You can make great decisions on the important things and still feel lousy when you struggle with the others.

So, what to do instead? Automate: if this, then that.

You can remove the need for willpower for all your unimportant or predictable decisions by building systems that look for clues and automatically make the best decision. If this is happening, then this is exactly what I’ll do. Poof! No more need to weigh your options.

But “automating your decisions” is a weird thing to think about and kind of hard to conceptualize. What does it look like? How does it work?

The easiest way is to look at some examples and try to emulate them—learn by doing. Here are five examples you can use right now to start automating your decisions every day.

1. Build a morning sequence.

When you wake up in the morning, do you know exactly what happens next? Do you always do the same thing, or do you  wait to “see how you feel” before getting out of bed? You won’t realize it in the moment, but that hesitation to decide just subtracted from your willpower account. Was it worth it?

A few years ago, when I realized how much I struggled with mornings and how much that struggle lead to poor decisions all day, I built an automation workflow to decide how my days should start. I call it my “habit ladder.”

Read next: The Habit Ladder: How To Make A New Routine Stick

When I wake up, I know exactly what to do and when to do it. If it’s before 6am, then I go back to sleep or read a book. If it’s 6am or later and it’s a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, then I get up and go for a run.

Almost every decision that can be made before I start work in the morning was decided long ago. No willpower required. That’s a good thing because it takes time for my brain to become useful in the morning anyway.

All the willpower I saved can be used when something really important comes across my desk later in the day.

2. Create a daily to-do list… for the rest of your life.

Every productivity freak on the planet knows the importance of the daily to-do list and there are lots of rules for it:

1. Do your important work first.
2. Always underestimate how much you can do in a day.
3. Make each task small and actionable
4. Blah, blah, blah…

The rules are great—I subscribe to many of them—but do you notice how you often end up writing the same to-dos every day and having that same conversation with yourself about what to do first? That’s wasted willpower right there. That’s what’s going to make you eat Cheetos at the end of the day when you know you’re on a diet.

You have recurring tasks in your life, but why think about them every day? Instead, create an automation system so you can think about them once and then just do them. I use Trello¹⁹ to organize my week. It looks like this:

When it’s time to sit down and work, I don’t have to think about what work to do. I already did that. All I have to do is get started. As you can see, if it’s Wednesday, then I have seven things to do. Looks like I’m crossing one off now!²⁰

Of course, there are things I need to do each day that aren’t (and can’t be) on this list, but that’s okay because I now have plenty of willpower to make good decisions on the important work that falls outside the system.

3. Simplify your wardrobe.

Except for a few additions for special occasions, the contents of my entire closet is:

• 5 button down shirts
• 5 v-neck t-shirts
• 4 pairs of pants.
• 1 belt

In other words, too much.

It’s normal to enjoy variety, but this is a perfect example of places in your life where small decisions spiral out of control and empty your willpower account first thing in the morning, leaving insufficient funds for the bigger, more important things that come later.

There was a time in my life when I stressed about what I would wear.

That was, coincidentally, a time when nothing of major importance happened either. If you think the 10 minutes you spend staring at yourself in the mirror and second guessing your underwear choice isn’t taking away from the bigger things, think again.

Truthfully, I still stress about what I’m going to wear. Instead of doing it every day, though, I now only do it when I go clothes shopping about once each year. I ask myself, “Does what I’m buying fit with everything else I already own?” If the answer is yes, then I buy it. If it’s no, then I don’t. Automation!

Today, I have a simple wardrobe that’s infinitely flexible. Everything goes with everything else, so I can grab whatever I want on a moment’s notice. I use the time I’d otherwise spend judging the pattern on my plaid shirt to think about how to make this article more fun for you to read. You’re welcome.

4. Simplify your food choices.

This is, admittedly, an area where I still struggle. Food is hard for me because I’m not good at thinking about it until I’m already hungry. That’s when I make bad choices that damage my health and eat up willpower for other important things.

But progress is being made. I’ve narrowed breakfast down to about four menu items and, for the most part, stick to them based on the day of the week. If it’s Monday, then I’m eating an apple with peanut butter. If it’s Thursday, then it’s eggs.

There’s much work left to be done on the rest of the day, but I know the system works because breakfast is an incredibly stress-free meal for me. In this effort, I can give most credit to my wife—a woman who values variety in her food choices but also carefully plans our menu out a week at a time. Using her system, my diet is much cleaner than it used to be.

5. Schedule your social interactions.

If it’s before 5pm, then I am working and I’m not out with friends. If it’s not Friday – Sunday, then I’m not in a meeting with anyone who isn’t on my immediate team.

As an introvert, these rules are mandatory for me.

I’m constantly fretting about not being good at relationships and simultaneously getting invitations to mid-day events and requests for meetings I feel like I should be at. If I get an email invite to a party, I can spend an hour or more thinking about whether or not to go and how to respond. But, with my automation rules, I know exactly what my answer will be.

Read next: For Introverts: How To Manage Your Overwhelming Social Calendar

This strikes the perfect balance for me. I can work through the day—my most productive hours—and still make plenty of time for my friends and other colleagues. In fact, it creates more time for them because I don’t waste an hour in the middle of the day worrying about how to respond to an invite. If it falls inside of “work hours” the answer is, “That sounds so fun, but I can’t make it. Can you do [insert time that does work] instead?”

I’m also careful not to squeeze too much interaction into any given week. I know if I go out two nights in a row, the next day is useless. If I overdo it one week, I clam up and don’t want to be social for several weeks to come.

These social automation rules keep the important work on track and keep my relationships strong by ensuring I never stress about them.

Do This in the Next 10 Minutes

You have too many decisions to make and not enough willpower to avoid decision fatigue. If you want to keep your focus on your most important work and be a leader to the people who depend on you, then you need a system to automate the small and predictable things that get in the way.

1. Build a morning sequence.
2. Create a daily to-do list… for the rest of your life.
3. Simplify your wardrobe.
4. Simplify your food choices.
5. Schedule your social interactions.

These are a few parts of my life I automate each day, and they’ve made me a happier, more productive person who doesn’t stress about the small things. You can’t do all five of these things today. But you can do one, so pick the one that seems easiest and test it out for a week.

The next time a life-changing decision comes up, you’re going to make the right call. And it won’t matter what clothes you’re wearing when you make it.

I stood on stage, looking out over everyone focused on me—waiting for me to speak, to say anything— and the voice in the back of head made its way forward to remind me, “You’re not good at public speaking.”

I was the opening talk for the TEDx event, and it was up to me to set the tone.

This is an extraordinary responsibility on top of giving the most important talk of your life and, had it been any other circumstance, I might have given into that voice. “Yeah, you’re right. I shouldn’t be here. I’m an introvert. I’m an internal editor. I can’t even finish a sentence with my wife without wanting a do-over.”

Thankfully, I’d done my homework. Not just on the talk, but on how to overcome my public speaking anxiety. I knew what I needed to say, I believed in the message, and I had a plan even if the perfect circumstances I spent so much time practicing in didn’t reflect reality on game day.

Today, I can get on stage in front of a few thousand people and speak with confidence and authority. If I’m lucky, some finesse and a few jokes that aren’t total duds. But it certainly wasn’t always like that.

When it comes to public speaking, any confidence I have is the result of a tremendous amount of work, frustration, cold sweats, and embarrassment. But I’m glad I had those experiences because they got me here—a place I can share some lessons about how to go from a terrified, bumbling idiot to a calm, confident communicator.

That, perhaps, will be the most useful part of this article for you—simply knowing that public speaking skills can be learned. You don’t have to be born with them.

From sharing an idea with a small team of friends to standing in front of thousands of strangers, these are the public speaking skills—many from speakers far better than me—that have transformed me from a timid, stuttering speaker to a confident, respected one. I hope they help you spread your own big ideas.

Slideshow by Canva Presentations.

1. Don’t give speeches about subjects you don’t know (duh).

This sounds like lazy, throwaway advice. It isn’t. If you follow it perfectly, the rest of the public speaking skills in this piece will be easy to follow.

Once you’ve given a few talks and put yourself out there as a public speaker, you’ll occasionally be offered opportunities to talk to a large audience somewhere far away and sexy sounding.

The only catch is the content. Maybe you’ve shown yourself as an expert on canary mating habits and you get an email asking you to attend a conference / office / meeting and talk about worldwide paperclip marketing and sales trends.

You should thank them for the offer and politely decline.

The reason is simple: you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Even if you study up in time, you won’t give a great presentation because you won’t care about the topic. You don’t actually want to give the talk, and they don’t want what you could actually present well on. They just like the idea of having you because they saw a video of you and think you’re great.

That’s what makes this advice so hard to follow. You’re new, you want exposure, and it looks like there’s a big opportunity for you.

If you’ve ever bought something because you hoped it would do something you knew deep down it really wouldn’t (cue every late night infomercial you’ve ever seen), you’ll understand the disappointment you’re setting both parties up for from the beginning.

And don’t forget: You always get more of what you say yes to. If you want to be a world-renowned expert on paperclip trends, step up to the plate. But if you have a specific message you want to spread, stick to it. You can adapt your message to fit a new audience, but never abandon it!

2. Script your transitions and not much else.

If you’re like me, you have a strong internal editor who sits on your shoulder with a red marker and a pair of eye glasses, ready to scribble “F! See me after class!” on every sentence you utter. No matter what you say, you feel like you could have said it better.

When you’re preparing a presentation, the natural inclination for people like us is to write a script. When you write a script, you get all the chances you need to get your wording just right.

As ancient Chinese warrior, Sun Tzu, said, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” And this is the problem with a detailed script.

In this scenario, there is no enemy, but there’s a world of uncertainty that comes from stepping on stage where everything is live and there are no do-overs. The more detailed your script is, the more opportunities there are to screw it up, and the more likelihood you will.

When you’re new to the public speaking world, messing up your lines and trying to remember what comes next is the last thing you need.

So what do you do instead? Just wing it? Not exactly.

While a detailed script will probably cause you more trouble than it’s worth, you need some sort of plan. What works better is to base your speech on stories (you know, those things you can’t forget even when you try) and script your transitions. Your talk should look something like this:

Stories are great because:

1. Audiences love them and need them to have a good experience.
2. You don’t have to script them because you’re programmed to remember them.

We’ve been telling each other stories for as long as we’ve been human. You’re genetically programmed to remember them (making them easy to present on) and, more importantly, your audience is genetically programmed to listen for them (making them happy when they hear one).

Since stories can be more free flowing, you don’t need to script every last word. The main points will do, and your human tendencies will take care of the rest. A scripted transition will help you wrap up one story and usher you, and the audience, into the next.

3. Practice public speaking (a lot) more than you think you need to.

Chris Guillebeau is the founder and annual emcee of The World Domination Summit. Over the course of a weekend each year, he delivers what amounts to probably 10 keynote talks. Sometimes, he has a story to tell. Other times, he just needs to remind the audience of 15 things before they break for lunch.

As a co-conspirator at WDS and a budding speaker, I once asked him, “How do you remember the sheer volume of things you need to say each time you take the stage?” I was hoping for a secret public speaking tip, but his answer—the truth—was unremarkable: “I practice a lot.”

So, that’s what I do, too. And it works.

Whenever I think I have my presentation down, I practice it at least 2-3 more times. It’s time consuming and often boring—you’ve been doing this for days or weeks and you don’t want to practice your speech again. But it isn’t about you. It’s about your audience. If you want the experience to be remarkable for them, you have to put in the unsexy work of boring, repetitive practice.

4. Build your talk in chunks.

Have you ever noticed most stories can be broken up in to distinct sections? You can do the same with your presentations. I do this every time I speak, and it shortens preparation time.

By working in chunks, you can develop and nail down different pieces of a presentation simultaneously. If one piece in the middle (or worse—in the beginning) is tripping you up, you don’t have to wait until it’s perfect to work on the rest, and you can practice the other parts while you work it out.

The faster you get your talk done, the more time you have to practice it until it’s second nature. Nothing breeds confidence like success, and nothing breeds success like practice.

Few people practice public speaking as much as they should. I guess “practice a lot” is pretty remarkable after all.

5. Slow down. Way down.

A common problem for introverts like me is that once we are talking, our mouths sometimes go into overdrive to keep up with the thoughts we’re trying to get out. My head is an idea generation and connection machine constantly charging forward. My mouth, on the other hand, is slow to speak, lest it make a mistake; there’s that internal editor again.

Once you break the seal and start letting an idea out, trying to keep it coming at the pace your brain is going is like an ant trying to steer a mastodon down a ski slope.

But trying to talk faster to catch up to your head produces exactly the effect you’re trying to avoid—stammering, getting lost, and re-explaining things you’d already explained. All the while, you start to stress yourself out which takes things even further off the rails.

If your idea is important, then it deserves all the time it needs to come out. You can’t just “talk slower” though. A more useful approach is to think more carefully.

The fast-talking babble problem is created by carelessness in how you string together your thoughts. You build loose connections in your mind that need more time to develop but, instead of developing them, you jump to the next one. A few skips down the road and you hardly know where you are anymore.

The fix for this is simple: when you notice your brain skipping too far ahead, you just tell it to go back and repeat itself. Wherever your mouth is, that’s where it needs to jump back to, and start over again.

Reminding myself to think slower works because I struggle to slow down my speech unless I also slow down my thoughts.

6. Don’t wander!

As I was prepping for my TEDx talk, I put my friend, Mike Pacchione—a professional speaking coach—in charge of “buzzing me” when he noticed me doing something bad. What he caught me doing often was wandering.

It happens when an idea appears out of nowhere as you’re talking and you decide to follow it. The problem is that wandering rarely stops at one idea. Once you feed the wandering beast, it takes over, and you go down the rabbit hole.

The problem isn’t that you can’t present well while you’re wandering, but that once you’ve wandered, you become lost. How does a hiker get lost in the woods? He takes one step off the trail to look at a plant. And then, oh, there’s a mushroom a few steps away. Hey, that tree up ahead looks cool. And then he turns around and has no idea where he is or how to get back.

The temptation to wander will be high and doing it is easy but, once you have, it’s hard to get back on track.

There are two practical fixes for this problem.

The first is to follow rule #3 above and practice a lot. The more you practice your presentation, the more you know your stories and where they should go. The more you know that, the less tempting it is to stray.

The other fix—the one you can use in the moment on stage when you’re about to wander—is to file your wandering thought away.

Your brain doesn’t want to let go of a wandering thought—it wants to explore it. The best way to stay on track is to remind yourself that you can explore it… just not right now. File it away. Maybe you can use it when you give this talk again in the future. But, for the love of God, don’t try to use it now.

7. Build a pre-talk calming routine.

My heart was pounding through my chest. I could feel my muscles tighten and vision start to tunnel. Breath rate was rising. “What’s happening?” I asked myself. I was on the verge of a panic attack.

I was about to step on stage to deliver the biggest talk of my life and the only thing I could think about was how I was going to screw it up. That triggered the stress response, and it was all downhill from there.

Luckily, I’d been coached on what to do when this happens. Vanessa Van Edwards, one of the greatest speakers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, was tasked with helping me prepare. She confided in me that she, too, gets nervous before big presentations. Had she not told me that, I’d have never guessed it.

The trick she uses? A pre-talk calming technique. Every great speaker has one, and every great speaker knows sticking to it is mandatory for delivering your best performance.

What Vanessa does is find a quiet space a few minutes before she’s scheduled to take the stage—sometimes in a bathroom—and does a two to three minute routine of power posing (think wonder woman pose), deep breathing, and envisioning success.

These things sound and feel a little silly, but they actually work.

Before a big event, it’s normal for your cortisol (the stress hormone) levels to rise. We’ve evolved to become extremely sensitive to stressful events. Just a few thousand years ago, feeling stress and not responding to it could have cost you your life.

That’s rarely the case today—I couldn’t find any reports of “death by embarrassment”—but our biology hasn’t exactly caught up.

The sick irony of it all is the more you give into your public speaking anxiety, the more likely you are to give a poor performance.

So, before you take the stage, make sure you check your stress levels. Excited is good. Nervous is bad. Always hold a few minutes before going on for your own calming session. The pros do it. It works. Ignore at your own risk.

Read next: Ace Your Next Interview With These Science-Based Social Hacks

8. When you screw up, keep going.

Before the show ended, I was a huge fan of The Colbert Report. I rarely missed an episode. And I wasn’t the only one—it was one of the most popular TV “news” shows on the air. If you watched the show, you probably didn’t notice that Stephen flubs his lines almost every episode. He’ll change a phrase to something that doesn’t make sense, miss a word, or mispronounce one.

You might not have noticed because, seemingly, neither did Colbert. When he messed up a line, he never stumbled or corrected. He just kept going because he knew something that us detail-oriented introverts must all learn to be effective public speakers:

Context matters more than the details.

He could flub a line and get away with it because he didn’t call attention to it. And no one noticed because no one is listening to every word you say. They’re listening for context. You can leave a surprising amount of content out of a message and still get the point across.

More damaging than a small mistake is calling attention to it. And if you flub something you can’t gloss over, let your sense of humor handle the situation. Make a joke about it and move on.

Read next: Make Them Laugh: Tom Brokaw Shows How To Recover From A Career-Ending Mistake

9. Remember the audience wants you to succeed.

If you follow the public speaking tips above, you’ll make huge strides in your ability to present ideas to a live audience.

But, perhaps the best advice I’ve gotten in this field that’s helped me actually put those eight rules above into action is this:

Always remember the audience wants you to succeed.

When you’re stressing out over how to do presentation, this simple truth can be easy to forget. Your audience didn’t show up to boo you off the stage. They want to learn what you have to teach them. They want to hear what you have to say. They’ve traded their time and, perhaps, money to listen to you. People don’t give up their time and money to have a bad experience. Just the opposite.

When you have a fear of public speaking, it’s easy to think, “What if someone doesn’t like what I say?” That thought starts to permeate and, suddenly, you’re asking yourself, “What if everyone hates me.”

This is the line of thinking that leads to bad presentations. Don’t let yourself go down that path because the reality is the audience is on your side. They want you to succeed. And if you follow these public speaking rules, the odds that you will are high.

The 30-Second Recap

I’m a highly introverted person who never thought I could be a strong public speaker. It’s taken a lot of work and help from people far better at it than me, but I’ve proven myself wrong.

If you’re an introvert like me, and you have important ideas to share, you can dramatically improve your public speaking skills with these nine fundamental rules:

1. Stick to what you know. Presentations fail when you try to present yourself as an expert on something you aren’t.
2. Tell stories, and don’t bother scripting them. Stories are easy to remember so you won’t mess them up. Script your transitions, and you’ll be set.
3. Practice more than you think you need to. Long, boring practice is what sets professional speakers apart from amateurs.
4. Chunk your speeches. Don’t get stuck thinking you have to work through it in a linear fashion.
5. Slow your brain down. When your brain is moving too fast, you start to stumble on your words.
6. Don’t wander. The temptation to step off the trail will be high. Once you do, it will be difficult to come back.
7. Save a few moments for your pre-talk calming routine. Never go on stage without doing this first.
8. Ignore your mistakes. Context is more important than perfect delivery. If you mess up, keep going.
9. Remember the audience wants you to succeed. Everything is easier when you remember everyone is on your side.

I hope this advice from an introverted public speaker helps you make some strides getting your own important message to more people. It’s sure helped me.

The solution: Do the opposite of what feels normal. Work hard when it’s easy and scale back when it’s hard.

I run marathons, but I’m hardly a leading expert on running. I’ve never followed a formal training schedule, hired a coach, or joined a running club. And I’m not fast—my PR is just under four hours—but I’ve always finished.

Training matters, but what gets me through a race as difficult as a marathon is an approach I take in my life that just happens to help my running, too.

I call it the Law of Equal Effort, and it’s pretty simple: Regardless what life throws at you, put in the same effort.

Following this theory, the progress you make over time can vary significantly but, in the end, you get to the same place and you feel a lot better when you’re done.

Most importantly, you actually make it to the end.

The Law of Equal Effort will help you when you’re taking on a big challenge and you don’t feel confident. You don’t always get to decide when things will be easy or hard, but you get to decide how to deal with the ups and downs when they come.

Here’s how you can put the Law of Equal Effort to work in your day-to-day life, as well as a few situations when you should take a different approach. We’ll apply it to three examples: running a marathon (naturally), building a business, and maintaining a relationship.

Define Your “Forever Pace”

Every long-distance runner is familiar with the idea of pacing. When you’re trying to go a certain distance, it’s the speed that—if you successfully maintain it—will get you to the finish line on time.

If you go too fast, you risk burning out. Any marathoner who’s ever “hit the wall” knows the misery that comes from running over pace.

I know my “forever pace” is around 9:45/mile. That’s the speed where it feels like—no matter what comes my way—I can keep running… forever.

Pacing applies to every area of your life, and knowing your forever pace will help you make smart decisions about how to take on big challenges.

Pacing When You’re Starting a Business

Say you want to start a business. First, you’d ask yourself if it’s your passion project you want to run forever or if you’re starting something to sell after a few years. Each of these scenarios needs a pace, but it will be different depending on the goal.

If you want to run your business forever, you pick a pace you can stick with forever. That doesn’t mean you will stick with it forever. But, if you don’t set a reasonable pace from the beginning, you’ll burn out and give up early.

On the other hand, if you’re building something you want to sell in two years, you’d ask yourself, “What needs to get done in the next two years?” and “What pace can I maintain that will get me there?”

You may need to push yourself pretty hard to make the goal, but you’ll at least know what that pace is so don’t go too fast (and hit the wall) or too slow (and miss the target).

Pacing for Relationships

What if you’re an introvert and you’re building a relationship with a new friend or partner? You don’t normally build relationships with an end in mind, so being aware of your forever pace is important.

Sprint in the beginning and you might get tired of them. Or you might burn them out and cause them to push you away.

If you go too slow, you might get frustrated things aren’t progressing or make the other person think you’re aloof.

Whatever you’re working on—a marathon, a business, a relationship, or anything else that takes time—knowing the pace you can maintain will help you make the best choices to get what you want in the time you want it.

Law of Equal Effort: When to Deviate From Your Pace

When you know your forever pace, you know what effort you have to put in to meet your goals. For example, if I want to beat my marathon PR, I know I have to keep a pace of at least 8:44 throughout the race.

The problem with pacing, though, is it’s one-dimensional while life has many dimensions that complicate things. This is where the Law of Equal Effort really shines.

In a marathon, there are physical complications—steep uphills that slow you down, long downhills that make it easy to coast, and joints that start hurting at random intervals.

Psychological complications, too. The people around you influence your actions. In the beginning, you’re surrounded by energetic people who make you want to sprint even though you have 26 miles left. By the end, you’re sore and surrounded by exhausted people. You want to slow down even though there’s only a tiny distance left.

A novice runner will ignore their pacing when it’s most important and try to stick to it when it’s least important.

They’ll get caught up in the excitement and run too fast at the starting line not realizing they just used up everything they need at the end. Or They’ll feel their pace slowing on a difficult hill and push themselves to speed up.

Both scenarios—especially combined—lead to burnout and poor performance.

A better approach is to maintain an equal effort throughout the race regardless what happens along the route.

When it’s early on and everyone’s sprinting, hold yourself back and conserve energy. Near the end, deploy that energy while the people around you are slowing down.

Most important, don’t try to maintain the pace at any cost. Instead, aim for an average speed.

If there’s a big hill, slow down and take it easy on the way up. It’ll take you “off pace,” but hills don’t just go up. They go down, too. So,  push yourself on the downhills—when it’s easy—to make up time.

Marathons are a metaphor. You can take the same approach in all areas of life. You don’t always control when thing will be easy or hard, but you do control how you react to either scenario.

Law of Equal Effort for Business

When you start a business, you’re signing up for a roller-coaster ride. One day, everything’s going your way. The next, “OhmygodthisissohardIjustwanttoquit!”

If you’re motivated to succeed, it’s normal to want to dig in your heels when things get hard. You work longer hours and push your willpower to the brink.

But what happens next?

1. You burn out when the hard times keep coming and you’re out of gas, or
2. You make it through, but have to slow down while things get easy again (the best time to make big gains).

You end up in a cycle where you’re working too hard when you should be slowing down and slacking off when you should be pushing harder.  It’s not healthy, and it doesn’t get you any closer to creating your vision.

What if you do the opposite?

What if, when times get hard (the uphills), you just keep plugging along with the same effort. You won’t make as much headway. But you’ll be strong and ready to make massive progress at exactly the moment things become easy again (the downhills).

Law of Equal Effort for Relationships

What about building a relationship? Watch any movie with a hint of romance, and it’s easy to be convinced that, when something strains the relationship, it’s time to step up and use all your energy to get things back on track.

But anyone who’s had a long, happy relationship in real life knows that isn’t how it works.

Wearing yourself out to fix a relationship snuffs out the flame. It makes it hard to enjoy the good times when they return. And that leads to the next crisis—a neverending cycle.

Instead of emptying yourself when things are hard, slow down. Take a calm, measured approach—one that doesn’t make things worse, but doesn’t try to fix them immediately, either.

When you get a signal that moods have softened, take it for all it’s worth!

It’s hard to make progress in a relationship when times are hard. Trust is low, feelings are hurt, you go into protection mode. The more you push here, the worse it gets.

But if you carefully nurture things back to a good place, you can make tremendous progress during the happy times. You have the energy to pour into the relationship exactly when you can get the most from it.

And that progress prevents the next crash. The hard times get further and further apart.

When the Law of Equal Effort Doesn’t Work

The Law of Equal Effort has served me well, but it’s important to note there are times it shouldn’t be used.

• Existential risk: When you’re on the brink of collapse, it doesn’t work. This could be a major crisis at work or your husband/wife/business partner is heading out the door right now. When you’re in that spot, suck it up and fight. Deal with the consequences of the burnout later.
• Severe burnout: If you’ve given it your best effort and you’re still exhausted and ready to give up before the end, it’s time to take a break. No, you won’t stay on pace, but you may at least finish. Trying to fight through an all-encompassing burnout doesn’t usually work.
• The end is in sight: Equal effort goes out the window once the end is in sight. When you can see the finish line, you don’t need to leave anything in the tank for later. Turn it up and let your adrenaline carry you to the end. You’ll collapse in exhaustion at the end, but who cares?

Final Thoughts on the Law of Equal Effort

If you’re a highly motivated person, the Law of Equal Effort feels unnatural and even wrong at first. But if you stick with it a while, you’ll see it works beautifully for so many areas of life.

It works because you’re still putting in the same effort, but you’re better aligning that effort with life’s uncontrollable circumstances so you’re not struggling unnecessarily and screwing up the future.

When you apply it right, you stay happy and motivated throughout the process. When you stay happy and motivated, you have a better chance of achieving your goals.

Try to remember what it felt like the last time you had a to-do list so long it made you want to give up and declare “to-do bankruptcy.”

I’m not surprised if you feel that way right now. A study by Harris Interactive found over 80% of people in America are stressed out at work. ²¹

I’ve felt the same many times. I’d sit down at my desk and, before even starting, I’d say to myself, “There’s no way I’m going to get everything done.” Defeated from the beginning.

This problem might be worse for introverts who work in a company where personalities don’t always match the task. You get sucked into meetings, the chatter is loud, and the environment can exhausting.

But there’s good news. If you haven’t taken a hard look at the way you do your work, there are probably some incredible opportunities to eliminate a large portion of your daily workload.

And just how is that possible? It’s all in the order of the work you do and how you prioritize. Here are a few examples from my own experiments in making my work day just a little more sane.

Problem #1: You’re Doing the Wrong Work

We all know different types of work suit different types of people. But, if you’re the type who likes to say yes to new things and accept challenges, it’s surprisingly easy for work that’s not a good fit for you—and never will be—to pile up like a mountain of mud.

I once found myself in exactly that place when I took over the customer service department in a business partnership. What I didn’t realize then (but quickly learned) was that I am comically bad at customer support.

As an introvert, my strengths lie in building systems and working on projects that can help lots of people all at once. I’m a poor fit for actually interfacing with those people on a daily basis.

The problem goes beyond just doing the wrong work, though. It takes a surprisingly small amount of it to foul up the work you should be doing.

You think, “Hey, I have eight hours in a day to get things done. I can spare one or two on this soul-crushing stuff. It’s a good opportunity.” But you’re wrong.

If you’re an introvert working on something better fit for an extrovert, then just an hour of “wrong work” can easily eat up four or more hours of productivity because it’s so draining. When you finish—if you finish—it’s hard to get motivated to do anything else.

Solution #1: Time Box & Delegate Your “Wrong Work”

So what’s the solution to a problem like this? You can’t just stop doing your work, right? People are relying on you to get things done. But when you’re doing the wrong work, you have to find a way out of it. Success—and your sanity—depend on it.

After finding myself doing too much wrong work, I did two things that helped:

1. I talked to my partners and we agreed to hire someone else to take over customer support.
2. I committed to spending no more than an hour each day answering support tickets.

Those solutions worked. Delegating support was a permanent fix and, until then, I knew I could triage support and keep us running without losing each day to wrong work.

If you don’t work for yourself like I do, this might sound like an impossible solution. What if your boss regularly dumps work in your lap and doesn’t care if it’s a good fit? Sometimes, this can be fixed with a long-term commitment to improving communication.

Your best shot at fixing the problem will be to show your boss two things:

1. How much more effective you’ll be when you’re working on your right work. If you spend a week ignoring the work that drains you and just doing what you’re good at, you’ll have proof of what you can accomplish when you’re not saddled by draining tasks.
2. Regularly reinforce what your right work is. In order to make sure the assignments handed to you are the right ones, take an active role in reminding the people around you what you’re good at.

If you work for a company that sees the connection between their success and how productive you are, you won’t be stuck in an impossible situation.

Related: How to Get Your Boss to Listen to Creative Ideas

Problem #2: You’re Working in the Wrong Order

This is a problem that causes an equal amount of havoc but you also have a lot of control over it. If you’ve never spent a day or more thinking hard about the order of the work you do and how you prioritize your time, you can be sure you’re wasting a lot of it.

The problem I faced was two-fold. First, the time I spent doing wrong work ruined productive work time in the future. Second, I was so focused on keeping up that I didn’t have time to work on actually solving the problem.

We’re human. We’re hard-wired to focus on what hurts and go for easy, short-term gains. For me, that meant the first thing I focused on each day was making the pain of the overstuffed support box go away. It was so relieving to see the inbox empty.

But what I ignored was all the long-term work I could have been doing to make the pain go away forever. By laser-focusing on squashing a small problem each day, I was ensuring the root problem would never actually be addressed.

Related: The Art of Doing Nothing: A Procrastinator’s Manifesto

Solution #2: Build Systems That Eliminate Work

The fix for this problem is obvious—focus on the big picture ahead of the urgent—but it’s oh-so-hard to actually do when the pain of doing wrong work is front and center.

Funny enough, what helped me start to solve this problem was a meltdown. One day, I woke up, and I could not get myself to answer support tickets. I gave myself three failing pep talks before giving up and watching Netflix all day, too defeated to do anything else.

When I opened the support box the next morning—dreading what I would find—something unexpected happened: the world, indeed, had not ended. Sure, there were more tickets than usual, but nothing had gone wrong. There were no problems that came in yesterday that couldn’t be fixed today and no one was so impatient they couldn’t wait a day for a reply.

It’s not ideal to make customers wait, but this was an incredible discovery for me: I instantly gained a free morning every other day. And I used that extra time to beef up our knowledge base, format automated replies for common questions, and fix other systems that lowered customers’ need for support in the first place.

Related: 5 Ridiculous Things I Do to Increase My Willpower and Make Smart Choices

It was like magic to me. All of a sudden, life was infinitely better. I had more time to do what I was good at, and that work translated to the creation of less work I was bad at. If I hadn’t had that panic-induced breakdown, I might not have realized it.

It’s difficult to do, but when you force yourself to prioritize your right work, it can actually reduce the amount of wrong work you need to do forever.

Examples in Real Life

I’ve used a personal example to illustrate how doing wrong work nearly broke me and how re-prioritizing lead to salvation, but you might wonder where you can put this to use in your life.

The opportunities are endless, but here are just a few that you have complete control over right now.

• Paying bills. If you find yourself constantly juggling funds between accounts while forgetting to pay bills, this is an area ripe with opportunity for improvement. Sit down on a weekend and pick one account you’ll spend money from. Set up every bill you can on auto pay and transfer enough cash to remove worry about checking and juggling funds every other day.
• Grocery shopping. Always struggle to find time to go grocery shopping? Don’t know what to buy when you do? Take a 24-hour fast and spend the time you’d normally spend eating building a meal plan. Find easy recipes and build a system so you always know what you’re eating for the next seven days. Grocery shopping will become easy and you’ll never waste time wondering what to eat.
• Running errands / doing unexpected tasks. Life is filled with small to-dos that pop up at inconvenient times. If you focus on the short-term, you might stop everything to try to fix the problem when it comes up. But if you were to take a long-term view, you might set aside a specific time each week to work on “unexpected tasks” and ignore small things that come up until then. Keep a list of what needs to get done, and batch it all together in one pre-determined session.

This is but a tiny fraction of all the opportunities in your life to refocus yourself on your right work so that the wrong work becomes less urgent or goes away entirely.

Put it to use at home and you’ll start seeing ways to introduce it at work.

Final Thoughts on Reorganizing Your Work

As I think about the things that helped me take control of my overwhelming to-do lists, the words that come to mind the most are “focus” and “systems”.

When I force myself to focus on the big picture I’m always happier with the result because it usually means getting rid of many smaller frustrations. And a system for managing things I must do but don’t want to removes the pain of figuring out how to do them or make time for them.

Both of those things add up to having very little wrong work to do each day and the little that’s left is no longer overwhelming. It can be done without thinking too much. It’s made every day tremendously more enjoyable for me.

If you see a little bit of yourself in the struggle I faced, I hope the solutions here make your life better, too.