Start with one habit

- [Interviewer] Could you maybe light a fire with some inspiration in terms of sharing a tale or two from some people or readers or clients who made the shift? Like where were they before, what'd they do, and then what kind of extraordinary results did they see? - [Interviewee] We have a question, yeah. What's the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything will be easier or unnecessary? And that has a lot of back history behind it but it's a specific question to try to get you to that answer. And I can tell you that when most people and almost I'd say 99% of the people that I've taught or worked with and that's now numbering in the tens of thousands you're looking up, they know the answer and they feel guilty for not doing it. You know, what's the one thing I can do for my marriage? They know that it's I just need to listen to my wife, you know? Or I just need to, you know, put up my dirty clothes in my morning. So I think most people do know their answers or they just haven't paused for the brief amount of time it takes to arrive at it. And then we teach people to kind of go all in. You know, if you know that this is important to you, my marriage, my family, my business, you fill in the blank, my health, you identify that one thing and then you try to make that thing just habitual. And so we launched a course earlier this year called Time Blocking Mastery where we walk people through 10 weeks of trying to build a habit. And one of the big findings in that research is, you know, every book that I'd ever read said that it took 21 days or 30 days to form a habit. But the actual science suggests that it's more like 66 days, a lot longer. And so I've watched people and I'll say the number one thing that I've seen, regardless of the habit, is when people take control of a small amount of their time, you know, they're just going to take 10 minutes to meditate in the morning or they're going to exercise for 30 minutes with their wife three days a week, they make a stand. They go all in. Like everything in my life is going to support this one thing. When they take control of that 30-minute sliver of time it gives them the confidence to start taking control of everything else. And I could go through example after example after example but that's been the generic experience as people focusing on one thing. They put it on their calendar so that they have to do it every single day. That's what we call the time blocking. You make an appointment with yourself to do something, not with someone else but to do something. And then you keep that commitment until it becomes a habit. And you know, there's BJ Fogg is a researcher at Stanford University, he taught 10,000 people how to floss their teeth using a similar method. And he just told them to floss one tooth every day. And the reality is if somebody pulls off the string to do one tooth, right, they're probably going to finish it. But he also understood the idea of momentum. And if you really just don't want to do it but you don't want to break the streak of doing it day-in and day-out, you can do one and say I did it. But over time he got 10,000 people. So it just one of those things that we all know we should be doing and we're not and there's just a few tricks and trade. So the two big ones are time block it or BJ Fogg would say piggyback it, right? Attach it to an existing habit. He said after I've brushed my teeth I will floss this tooth. I would say, you know, that's definitely how a lot of my habits work.