#333 - 7 Principles for a Happier Life (Part 6)

0:00Happy Monday, Phil fam. We are kicking off the week right where we left off last week. And we are on day six of happiness advantage week. A name that Mike really, really loves. It's terrible name. You see how hard it is to say happiness advantage week. I drop the duh like the thing still not good. All right. Well, today we're talking about why good habits can be so hard to stick with and a simple way to make them easier. You're really going to like this one. Like this beautiful. So in the happiness advantage Sean tells this story about him wanting to start playing the guitar more. And I can definitely relate to that because there have been so many times in my life where I said, you know what? I used to play an instrument as a kid and I really want to play one as an adult. And I've tried and I've tried and I've tried and I've spent thousands of dollars on instruments. trumpet player trumpet player also played the flute. Which is which is very embarrassing to admit.

1:03I chose the flute in elementary school because it was the smallest instrument and I didn't feel like carrying it to school every day. And Nick has abused me ever since. But anyway back to the Sean Acre story. So he already owned a guitar. And this guitar was in a beautiful case tucked away in his bedroom closet. And so every day he would have this grand intention to pull out the guitar and play it and practice it. But he never would. And then one day it just hit him. I need to get this thing out of this case. I need to get this thing out of this closet. And I need to buy a guitar stand and just have it free standing in my room. Because by the time I would go into the closet and I would take it out of its case. There was just too many steps for his brain to say, no, I'm not doing that. There's too much friction. So the moment he bought this guitar stand and just kept it out in the open, he was able to just pick it right up and just start playing with zero friction. And this little anecdote, this little story brings us to habit number six principle number six.

2:05I should say make good habits easier. This is like the biggest cheat code for like I absolutely love this one. It is so simple. I'm going to talk about it before. But it's like one of those things that you need to keep hearing over and over again. Because we firmly believe obviously that the habits that we perform each day really create who we are as people. And we all have these really big intentions of the people we want to be that we aspire to be. And we had like we want to play our guitars. We want to eat healthy. We want to play chess, me and you in the office, right? This is one thing that I think of right away. It's like when we put our chessboard on our table in the office and then you had all the pieces set up, we were so much more likely to play chess every day. But then when all the pieces were placed inside the box and tucked underneath the couch, we didn't play for months. Yeah, there's actually a principle in atomic habits not to bring in another book. But this reminds me of one of those principles, which is make it obvious. It's one of the four. It's one of the four laws of behavior change in that book that I remember. It's make the new

3:10habit obvious or make the bad habit that you want to stop doing. Yeah. Non-obvious. Like remove it from your mental picture as much as possible. I think the best use of our time right now is to probably just talk about some real examples that people can actually use in their every day. So for me personally, one thing that this has helped me, which tremendously is my diet. And when it comes to your diet, what you have in your house, you will eat, right? So if there's friction with you and the bad things in your house, bad, bad, the bad, right? So if you have junk food in your house, one little cheat code that I have found is put it in a place that is very hard to get. So I will literally stand on a chair and put it all the way at the top of my kitchen cabinet so that if I really, really want to, I have to shame me, get a chair, drag it over, stand on the chair to get that snack, right? I actually saw a meme the other day on Twitter. There was like when you go to the supermarket and you force yourself not to buy any unhealthy snacks, but then it's like 8 p.m.

4:13and you realize you don't have any snacks. It's like just the sad person. So with this, you can have the snacks, but you're just putting more friction in between you and the snack. That's a good one. And then the same is also true for healthy stuff, right? Cut up so cucumbers is like a really amazing snack or carrots, right? But sometimes me and my wife will go to the supermarket, we'll buy these things, but then they say in the fridge because we didn't like and you know, throwing them out. Yeah, we didn't clean them, you know, and cut them up and have them ready to go on the fridge. And then we throw them out. We don't need a healthy snack. We go for the quick bag of chips or something, right? So get home from the grocery store, you clean it, you cut it, you put it in the fridge and now you have healthy snacks. For me, the biggest life-changing stuff is always the, I call it the night before stuff. So like setting yourself up for success the next day are some of the most important habits that I do. So like setting up my clothes for not even for, I set up not just my clothes, I have a whole PN routine in my notion document that's like, I set up my salt water in the morning. I set up my coffee. I saw that when I came here. I set up

5:16my, what else? I set up my gym clothes. I set up my pre workout. I set up my, okay, my regular clothes. I set up all of these things that I before, so that when I wake up, it's like there's no thinking, there's no like, there's no chance for my brain to even think twice. It's just go. Yeah. So I think that's like the night before is so important. Yeah, that's my last example. And then we'll end this. One thing that I've always wanted to do is read more books. And I always had this great intention of wanting to do it, but I never found the time in my day to do it. So one thing that really worked well for me is before I would leave the office at the end of the day, I put the book I wanted to read right in the center of my desk where I placed my laptop every morning, make it obvious. And I made it very obvious. So I could not put my laptop down in the morning the next day until I read 10 pages of that book. And that helped tremendously to create that good habit of reading 10 pages of that. Yes. So let's go to the call to action. Mike, this is an exciting one today because today's a special special day. Tell us Mike. Well, today is world gratitude day, September 21st. And Nick and I have a very, very,

6:20very, very exciting announcement. What is it? We are launching the world's simplest gratitude journal. Yeah. Yes. It is already out in the wild. If you're listening to this right now, you, if you're subscribed to our newsletter, you already got the link to go and buy it. It is called one good thing a day. And it's inspired by this concept right here by this principle. We for so long, we're trying to stay consistent with the gratitude practice. And we've tried all sorts of gratitude journaling, gratitude journals, gratitude journaling practices. And what we found is that we never stick to them because they're always just too complicated. Five minutes even like for example, the five minute journal, five minutes is still too much time, which is crazy in this day and age that we have one. So we have simplified it down to literally just one good thing a day. So every day you flip to that page, you flip to that date and you write down one good thing that happened to you that day and day by day as you consistently do this very low friction thing,

7:20you start to reprogram and re rewire your brain to start finding the good in your life that's already there. And I've been doing it for a couple months now as the prototype. And it really has changed my life in a huge way. And where can people get it? They can get it at onegoodjournal.com. I will link that in the show notes. And today only it is 21% off for September 21st world grad of today. Love it. And how does this connect to our episode here today, Mike? Because it's simple enough for you to actually like want to do and stick with like one good thing is so so easy to do. By the way, my favorite part of the journal that I didn't actually plug is the fact that for each page, you see that date, but you can see up to three years of good things in one day. So if you do the practice consistently, which is designed for, then three years down the line, you can see where you were two years ago. Well, good things you were counting a long time ago and you get to see your growth over time. So if you do go make that purchase today and support us, that would mean the world to us. Yeah, we made a thousand of them and we have no idea how many we're going to sell. But

8:24it would mean the world to us if you bought the journal and started practicing gratitude because that will help us with our overarching mission of making positivity go viral. One person practicing gratitude is really all it takes to make that happen. But tying it back to the episode today, once you do make that purchase, if you do support us, place that journal in a place where you can see it every single day and make that good habit. Obviously and easy to use. And that's what the call to action is today. So thanks for being here. We love you and we'll see you for day seven. Our final day of happiness and vanity week. Mannyana. Ciao. Bye bye now.