All right, Charles, I want to show you something. So, in 2014, I wrote about how I lost weight. But previously, I used your book a year before because I had a little bit of a drinking issue and it was frankly kind of ruining my life. And I read your book and the idea of the habit loop changed my life. And that's why I'm so excited to talk to you.
Your book changed my life probably more than any book I've ever read, and I have read probably thousands of books. So, I'll tell you the story. So, basically, yeah, I had like an issue with alcohol and I read your book and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but the way that I distinctly remember it is that a habit doesn't go away. You just have to change part of the routine and replace it.
That's exactly right. One of the ways that people continue being stuck on this treadmill, and this sounds very oversimplified, but it's true in my case, like you start craving carbohydrates the day after you drink. Like you still crave, because I was drinking like 20 beers a day, and I still craved like the sugar. And so I actually just made a small habit. Every time I wanted to drink alcohol, a beer, I ate a pack of M&M's. And that sugar replacement actually helped me kick booze. Then I replaced that with non-alcoholic beer, and I got fat along the way, but I was like, I'll get fat and then I'll kick that habit later.
I love this. I look because you're exactly right. So, for folks who aren't familiar with it, the habit loop is what research tells us is that every habit in our life, and about 40 to 45% of what we do every day is a habit. Every habit has these three components. There's a cue, which is like a trigger for the automatic behavior, and then the routine, right? Picking up the beer and drinking it, or you going for a run if you have an exercise habit. And when we do that, it delivers a reward to us. Every habit in your life delivers a reward whether you're aware of it or not. And over time, our brain begins to associate this cue, this routine, and this reward into a little package that happens almost automatically inside our brain. And at the core of it, you're exactly right, is this craving. And there's a woman named Dr. Ann Graybiel at MIT who's done research on habits and what she's found is that if you create a habit in say a rat's brain for running a maze and then you remove it from the maze for literally years and then bring it back and drop it in the maze again, that habit reemerges instantaneously and it's because this cue, routine, and reward, the neural pathways associated with those three things have gotten thicker and thicker and thicker. And so when you try and extinguish a habit, when you just say I'm going to stop drinking, just, you know, I'm going to white knuckle it and give up cigarettes, because that neural pathway still exists. You still have that craving. You still have that urge. So, you're exactly right. The key is don't try and extinguish the habit. Rather, try and change it. Find a new behavior like eating M&M's that corresponds to the old cue and that delivers something similar to the old reward. And in doing so, you're kind of overwriting that neural pathway inside your brain.
And I did this with the help of a doctor and I was like, look, the doctor was like, just get fat for a little while. We'll figure that out later. So I got fat and then that's when I wrote this blog post of how I lost weight. And the way that I lost weight, it was very simple. You had this idea called a keystone habit, which I don't know if you invented that term, but that's crazy because like it's like a term that everyone uses now. But basically my keystone habit was that I would put my running shoes next to my bed and then I would sleep in my workout gear that morning. So when I woke up I was in my running gear or in my, you know, workout gear and then when my feet touched the floor they went into the shoes.
Yeah, that's a really smart cue and yeah, I actually did come up with the phrase keystone habit.
Did you really? That's awesome.
Well, my wife is a biologist and there's this concept of keystone species. And so I was talking through this idea which exists in the scientific literature but had never been kind of called this and we were like, it's kind of like a keystone habit. But what I love about what you just said is that so there's a writer named David Epstein who, he's written a bunch of books, he will also sleep in his workout clothes. And it's because that cue, when you wake up and you throw your feet out of bed and you're already in your clothes, that cue, it just makes it so easy to like take the next step and like go out the door, right? Like you probably at this point when you are running, you're not even thinking about running as you start. You're just kind of on autopilot. You're doing what feels natural. And this is the power of habits is that we can choose these behaviors that we want to encourage and we can make them not a product of willpower or of, you know, sort of white knuckling it but rather something that happens automatically because there's this part of our brain, the basal ganglia, that exists just to make habits and that's what ultimately makes us successful is choosing the habits that we want, figuring out how to design them by paying attention to the cues and rewards around them and then making those behaviors so automatic that you don't have to decide to go for a run in the morning. You don't have to decide to skip that beer. You don't have to decide to sit down and, you know, pound out all those emails you've been thinking about. It just happens automatically and as a result, it feels much easier.
My last company, I think we had 30-ish employees when I sold and then my current company now, we are at around that. And both of those stages are when systems and processes start to really matter.
Yeah. And there's this phrase in the CEO world, something like you don't rise to your willpower, you fall to your systems or something like that, where it's like the system is what dictates whether you're going to be successful or not, not like, you know, willpower or not like how you feel.
And the point being at a company you have to have systems because that's what you default to.
That's what you rely on. Yeah. And can I ask you, okay, so when you've thought about the systems you've created now that you guys are at 30 people and the systems really matter. What's a system that you've developed that you're really proud of, like an institutional organizational habit?
I'll give you one really simple example, but I will say like people like me, entrepreneurial people, the skill set that is required to start stuff is the exact opposite typically of a process creating skill set.
I work my ass off at creating and sticking to processes, but it does not come natural. But I'll tell you one that has made a huge difference. Every day at 3:00 p.m. the company stops for 10 minutes and we clean the office because I cannot stand clutter at our office. And what I'm trying to convince my staff, and it's actually working, they're doing this at their homes and everything, which is we're just trying to sweat the small stuff and do the small things really nicely and it starts with like cleaning your bed or making your bed.
And so I'm really proud of that.
And I'm sure you're giving everyone this sense of accomplishment, right? Like cleaning up the clutter is not that big an accomplishment, but to come together and have someone say like, this is who we are. This is how we prove to ourselves what we stand for. That's enormously rewarding.
And it actually gets to this other thing that's really interesting about psychology, which is what's known as revealed versus stated preferences. That oftentimes when you ask people, do you want to exercise every day? They'll say, yes, I want to exercise every day. It's really important to me. But when we look at their behavior, they exercise like twice a week, right? So the revealed preference is actually different from the stated preference. And our brain pays attention to that. Our brain actually is kind of skeptical of our stated preferences, but it pays attention to how we behave to figure out who we really are. And so this act of cleaning up every day at 3:00. And I'm sure, look, you could go a day without cleaning at 3 and the company's not going to fall apart, right? But it's not about organizing the clutter. It's about revealing to ourselves, proving to ourselves that we are the kinds of people who do this. We are the kinds of people who we say we are. That's really powerful.
All right. So, this episode is all about excellence. A while back, I shared my personal framework for building excellence in my own life, and the team at HubSpot turned it into a 30-day operating system that you can check out right now. It breaks down the systems that took me 10 years to figure out and shows exactly how I use them day-to-day. These are systems that genuinely changed my life. So, if you want to build a good life, scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Now, let's get back to the show. How many copies did The Power of Habit sell?
Gosh, worldwide, it's sold over 10 million now. So, it's crazy.
It's been great. Yeah. And the best part is just getting emails from folks with stories like yours that say, you know, I struggled with drinking for years and then I finally figured out how to think about the cues and rewards to make this easier to overcome. That's what's really meaningful.
That's crazy, man. That's a lot of copies. And where were you before? You were a reporter.
Yeah, so I was a reporter for the New York Times. And in fact, I continued being a reporter for the New York Times for a number of years after the book came out. Weirdly, actually the same year that The Power of Habit came out, I won a Pulitzer Prize for a series I had done at the New York Times. And so 2013 was like kind of a crazy year.
Was that the Apple series?
That was the Apple series. Yeah, exactly. The Apple series. And one of the things I learned, I was talking to Jim Collins, the guy who wrote Good to Great, last night on stage because he has a new book out and he talked about the bewildering fog of success. And that year, 2013, was exactly that for me. On paper, it was the best year of my life. I had a best-selling book. I won a Pulitzer Prize. In reality, it was like the hardest year of my life because, and you know this, when success comes, it can kind of catch you off guard with all of its demands and emotions. And so that was a big year, but also in retrospect, a tough year. And since then I've written a couple more books including Super Communicators, which you'd mentioned, and now I write for the New Yorker magazine.
I remember I felt defensive of you when Atomic Habits came out because you were my guy and I'm friends with James. And I'm sure you are too, but when I saw Atomic Habits come out, I was like, but I already read the original. This is just like...
That's very nice of you. But the truth is, whatever it takes to get it into people's hands, like it feels so good to be able to be the master of your own habits. It feels so good to be the person you want to be. And so whatever it takes to get that empowerment into people's lives, I am all for that.
So like a lot of our listeners are like type A go-getters who are probably a little neurotic at times. And maybe they're like me where I'm pretty emotional and I react to things fast, which is kind of silly. Is there a way that you have seen a lot of these type A people use the power of habit at work or in their career to be more productive?
Yeah. You know what I hear a lot from executives is them saying, look, I was in this bad pattern that I didn't even recognize was a pattern, which is I knew I had to write an email, right? It was a tough email. I didn't want to deal with the question that the email was asking. I knew I might disappoint someone. And so I would put it off. I would basically, you know, it'd be in my inbox. I would say, I'm going to deal with this later. And hours would go by, days would go by. And what's happening during that period is that there is a cognitive load, a cognitive burden associated with that email going unanswered, right? There's some part of your brain that says like, look, you've got this task you need to get done and it's an unpleasant task. You don't like thinking about it. You like shying away from it. But the more you shy away from it, the more it becomes like this monster in your head.
And sometimes it's the smallest stuff.
Totally. And what we know is that if you build this habit that your immediate response is to hit reply and just deal with it right away, the benefits of that are huge. Right now, you might not write the most polished email on the face of the planet, right? You might not have all the time to think it through. So you have to question, is this something I can respond to right away? But when we get it off our plate, what we're doing is we're freeing up our brain to think about other things. Our brain is constantly keeping track of the thousands of things that might be threats or might be opportunities or might be crises. And the more that we clear our brain and give it space to think about the good stuff, the opportunities, the ways to move forward, the new ideas, the more we're empowering ourselves to actually get things done.
So, I have, as we speak, I have 349 unread text messages. And I have a shitload of voicemails, tons of Twitter and Instagram DMs. The amount of inbound notifications, and partially because I'm on a podcast that has a lot of listeners, but even if you're not that, the amount of inbound notifications that people get, it's unsustainable.
So just because you get an email like that, we have this instinct to hit reply, does not mean you have to reply, right? Because another habit that's equally important is just to ignore. Like the fact that somebody sends me an email, that does not create an obligation on my to-do list to respond to them. What it does is it gives me the option to kind of choose, do I want to respond? And so one of the things that I do, because very similarly, there's just an overwhelming amount of stuff that comes in, I try and be really disciplined and my first habit, my first instinct is just to hit delete. Like when something, and oftentimes someone will send me a really interesting article or there will be something I'm like, oh man, I should really go back and read that. That's really, I want to save that for later. And instead what I do is I hit delete because I know I'm never going to go back and read it, right? And I don't think that we have to get to inbox zero. I don't think we have to interact with every single thing that's sent to us. I think what we should have is a habit to graze over it and to forgive ourselves for hitting delete because ultimately the most important choice that we make is where to spend our attention. And if we're making that choice based on the whims of other people because they send us an email or a DM, then we're not actually making a choice. We're abdicating that responsibility.
It's sort of like, I think we had Tim Ferriss on and people make fun of Tim Ferriss because they're like, dude, you're working more than four hours a week, you know what I mean? And so he sort of created his own little trap. When you have bad habits in your life, I have to imagine that people like your buddies mess with you. They're like...
Oh no, my wife is merciless.
What bad habits do you have still that you have been unable to break?
So here's the thing about habits is in our brain there's no such thing as a bad habit or a good habit. Right? The basal ganglia is this part of our brain that creates habits and it actually evolved just to do that. And every animal on earth actually has a basal ganglia. If we couldn't form habits, we would not evolve because we would have to spend too much time thinking about whether we pick up the rock or the apple and take a bite out of it. So habits are really, really important. But to our brain, our brain just says, look, if there's a pattern of a cue, a routine, and a reward, I'm going to make that easier and easier to do. It doesn't say, this is a good habit or this is a bad habit. It's up to us to decide which habits are good and which are bad. Which ones we want to encourage and discourage. And so, I would say I have lots of bad habits, right? But they're bad habits that I choose. Like, I like to have once or twice a week, I like to have a cocktail when I come home from work, right? And that in some people's eyes could be a bad habit. But for me, it's just a nice way of signaling to myself that I can relax. Some people might see that as a bad habit, but for me, it speaks to what I like about life. So, I would say the thing that's happened to me as a product of my research is that I've recognized that you get to choose your habits. And just because other people think they're good or bad, that does not mean that they have to be good or bad for you. The key is to have agency, to have control over your life. And the way we do that is by not just focusing on the behavior, but by looking for these cues and these rewards, looking for these leverage points that we can use to change and become the person we want to be. And frankly, it's challenging. It's challenging to decide which is the thing.
I think that I call myself like a high functioning person. Like I think I have a lot of horsepower and the strength of that is that I can run through a wall and the weakness of that is that I can run through a wall because...
I have this thing called a 5-year diary where every year on the same day, every day on a page I write how I feel that day and then the next year I see the same page so I can see how I'm feeling a year prior. I was joking with Sean, my co-host on this podcast. I was like, dude, I wrote about this thing in my journal this day last year, and I complained about the same problem. I'm like, if I'm supposed to be this high functioning person that changes or adapts and grows, I'm sure not doing it. What the hell? Why can't I change? And so, it is sort of interesting that you become like a prisoner of habits. And what you said was cool because you do want to become this person who can change their life. But the fact is, my opinion is most people don't change. And I think it's really because I think it's like almost impossible to change.
Well, and what I hear in that diary that you mentioned is what's known as a cognitive routine. So what are you really doing when you write that one line? Because writing one line is not like life-changing, right? To sit down and write a one-liner about how you feel about your day. But what you are doing is you're creating a mental habit for yourself. And the most important habits tend to be mental habits. In psychology, they're known as cognitive routines. And their job is to allow us to think more deeply when thinking deeply is hardest. Right? When we're feeling stressed out or when we're feeling overwhelmed or when we don't have that much time, we only have time to write one line in a little diary. What that cognitive routine does, that mental habit, is it causes you to pause and look at the previous year. And the fact that you say to yourself, okay, look, I'm stuck in the same rut that I was a year ago. And actually, I didn't even really recognize that. Or if I did recognize it, it's just I wasn't paying attention to it. But this is something that's forcing me to think about this rut, to ask myself like, why am I in this rut? How do I get out of this rut? Do I really care about this rut that much? Those cognitive routines, these mental habits that we build for ourselves are really, really powerful because they allow us to do the thing that you just mentioned, which is make decisions without being exhausted. And one of the most powerful is when I come home from work, I describe my day in excruciating detail to my wife and she does not really care about my day. Like she doesn't want to know all the specifics of the meeting I was sitting through. But I'm not really doing it for her. I'm doing it for me. This is my cognitive routine to help me review my day and figure out what I did well and what I did poorly. And building those cognitive routines, those mental habits, that is how we end up becoming successful because it's those small little habits that determine if we're using our attention wisely or not.
You have this book called Super Communicators. I haven't read it yet, but I read a great article on it. And when I was younger, I read this book called How to Win Friends and Influence People.
Yeah. It changed my life. I'm not naturally like a very good conversationalist or a good people person. My family calls me a little neurospicy, you know. I kind of had to learn a little bit, like I had to read a few playbooks on how to have normal interactions. And so Dale Carnegie kind of changed my life. And there was a handful of takeaways from that book. And one of them was basically if you have a conversation with someone, if you let them do most of the talking and you ask them all about their lives and themselves, they're going to think that it's the greatest conversation they've ever had. And your book, Super Communicators, it did a good job. I believe the premise of the book is like if you ask, not only if you, but you took a step further. If you ask more questions but also ask these, I don't know, you give some questions but you give like a framework. If you ask different types of questions that fall under a bucket that I want you to tell me, you will get people to open up more. Is that right?
Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. So one of the things that we know is first of all, we are all super communicators at one time or another, right? We all know like the right thing to say to a friend to make them feel better or sometimes you walk into a meeting and you just like, you know exactly what to say to get everyone on your side. But there are some people who are consistent super communicators, people who can seem to connect with anyone any time. And the difference between them and everyone else is not this inborn capacity. It's not that they are born with a gift of gab. It's that they think about communication a little bit more and they recognize that communication is just a set of very simple skills that if you practice them, they become habits. And when you start practicing them and using them, you can kind of treat everyone like your best friend. And they'll all respond the same way. And one of those skills is asking questions. Consistent super communicators ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. And some of those questions are like just invitations like, oh, what do you think about that? Or, did you see that movie? Like, it's invitations into the conversation. But some of them are what are known within psychology as deep questions. And a deep question is something that asks me about my values or my beliefs or my experiences. And that can sound a little bit intimidating, but it's as simple as like if you meet someone who's a doctor, instead of saying, oh, what hospital do you work at? Asking them, oh, what made you decide to go to medical school? Right? That second question is something that invites them to tell you who they really are. They got to tell you about like their dad getting sick and seeing the doctors help him or that they want to be a healer. They want to help their community. Deep questions are the things that allow us to really connect with other people because they invite others to tell us who they are. And then the best part is it's very natural to answer our own deep question ourselves, to say, oh, you became a doctor because you saw your uncle get sick. That's really interesting. I became a lawyer because I had a brother-in-law who got arrested when I was a kid. And I thought that was really wrong. Now we're having a conversation about who we are. We're connecting with each other and that means that we're going to trust each other more. We're going to like each other more and more importantly, we're going to be able to hear each other much more accurately.
This sounds like such a dumb question, but why do I care? Like, why do I want someone to think that I'm a super connector? Like, why do I want them to open up to me?
Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, so there's a couple of ways. And first of all, you don't have to communicate with everyone, right? Sometimes you're going to get in the Uber and you just want to check your phone in the back of the Uber. You don't want to have a conversation with the driver, that's okay. You don't have to have any conversation you don't want to have. But there are times that we do want to connect with other people. And the reasons why is because we are a pro-social species. The way that our brains have evolved is to push us to connect with other people because connecting with other people over time has been the most successful strategy in building things, building communities, building families, building products. And when we connect with someone else, when we communicate with them, even if we disagree with them about some pretty fundamental things, there is this almost subconscious thing that happens within our brain that we're powerless against, which is if I feel connected to you, if I feel like you're listening to me and I'm listening to you and that we're actually connected somehow, and within neuroscience, this is known as neural entrainment. In that moment, we trust each other more. And if you think about it, trust is at the core of pro-sociality. I can't police you all the time to see if you're a threat or if you're being genuine. All I can do is try and figure out whether I can trust you enough to let you live in the hut next to me without fear that you're going to come in and kill me. And the way I figure out whether I should trust you or not and like you and want to work with you is by connecting with you. Because if that connection feels genuine, then it doesn't mean I'm going to give you my life savings, but it means that for the time being, I've said this person is at least trustworthy enough that I know who they are. They know who I am. I have a hard time seeing them betraying me. And so, as a result, we can live side by side peacefully. And if you think about it, in business, trust is everything, right?
The reason you're successful in business, the reason you're successful in life, the reason you're successful in romantic relationships is because you figure out ways to connect with other people that are not just transactional but are real.
That's fascinating. So I can ask questions that get like, I think you said value-based. What else can I do?
Okay, so the first thing is ask more questions, right? Ask these deep questions. The second thing is that you need to be having the same kind of conversation as the person you're talking to. And to explain this, I'll sort of give you an example. So, when I started writing Super Communicators, one of the reasons why was because I had fallen into this bad pattern where I'd come home from work and I'd start complaining about my day and tell my wife, you know, like my co-workers don't appreciate me and my boss doesn't realize what a genius I am. And she would give me some good advice. She would say something like, why don't you take your boss out to lunch and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better. But instead of being able to hear her advice, I would get even more upset and I would start like saying, you know, you should be outraged on my behalf. You should be on my side. And I couldn't figure out why there was this tension between us. And so I went to these researchers and they said, well, the main thing that's happening here is when you're having a discussion, you think you know what that discussion is about, right? You're talking about your day or next year's budget. But actually, if we look inside your brain, what we see is there's a bunch of different kinds of conversations all happening at the same time. And in general, these conversations tend to fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical conversations where we're making plans together or we're solving problems. But then there's emotional conversations where I tell you what I'm feeling and I don't want you to solve my feelings. I want you to empathize. And then there are social conversations which is about how we relate to each other and how we relate to other people, the identities that are important to us. And they said, what we've discovered is all three of these conversations are equally important and all three of them will probably happen during a discussion, but if you and the person you are talking to are not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, you cannot fully hear each other. You definitely won't feel connected to each other. Your trust in each other will not go up. So the key is this is the second big skill in addition to asking more questions that consistent super communicators have is pay attention to what kind of conversation is happening. Does this feel practical? Does it feel emotional? Does it feel social? What kind of words is the other person using and then match them. What's known within psychology is the matching principle. If you're talking about next year's budget and you say something like, look, I'm really anxious that we got this right because I don't want to lay people off. As a super communicator, in my head, I should be hearing, oh, you're actually having an emotional conversation right now. Well, we're not talking about the budget. We're talking about how you feel, and I need to empathize with that before we can start talking about practical things. I need to say to you, I understand exactly what you're feeling. I feel exactly the same way. I want you to know my number one goal here is that we don't have any layoffs, that we get to protect our people. So, with that in mind, can we talk about the budget, like how to actually get that done? In other words, with your permission, can we move from an emotional to a practical conversation together? When I do that, what I'm doing is I'm signaling to you that I'm listening to you. I understand your mindset and we are getting aligned. We are getting neurally entrained. We're getting in sync, which means that we're going to hear each other much, much better and we're going to trust each other more.
I'm obsessed with, like, I love history and I've read biographies on a huge lot of the presidents and three presidents that are very, very different and are very effective communicators are George Washington, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump. They communicate drastically differently, but I would argue they're all very effective.
I absolutely agree. George Washington was significantly more stoic and mysterious and spoke seldom and when he did speak you listened no matter what and he had this regal status. Bill Clinton was very charming and then Donald Trump, his stick is more like way more crude, like riffing with you like we're boys.
