Most humans crave order and meaning in existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world. For much of history, religion served this function (eg being a servant of God). But as secularism rises, a void remains that is filled by nihilism and empty ideologies.

Peterson believes that there is real meaning and good in existence. Look at it this way - if real evil exists (human suffering, especially inflicted by other humans), then good is the opposite of this - it is preventing evil from happening.

You should therefore conduct your life to produce good. This will lead to meaning. This will make your existence matter. Your actions will matter, taking care of your health will matter, having good relationships will matter.

**Rule 1: Fix your posture. Others will treat you with more respect.**

*   There is a part of your brain that is constantly monitoring signals to figure out your position in society. How you see others, and how others treat you, affect how you view yourself. If others kowtow to you, you elevate your own impression of status. If others denigrate you, you lower your internal status.
*   If you slouch, you convey defeat and low status to others; they will then treat you poorly, which will reinforce your status. (This can be reinforced in serotonin signaling, related to depression)
*   Fix your posture to get others to treat you better, which will make you feel better and stand tall, thus kicking off a virtuous cycle.

**Rule 2: Take care of yourself, the way you would take care of someone else.**

*   Many people are better at filling prescriptions for their dogs than themselves. Similarly, you may self-sabotage yourself daily - by not taking care of your health, not keeping promises you make to yourself.
*   Peterson argues that you do this because of some self-loathing - that you believe you’re not worth helping. Instead, you have to believe that you have a vital mission in this world, and you are obliged to take care of yourself.
*   Nietzsche: “He whose life has a _why_ can bear almost any _how_.”

**Rule 3: Surround yourself with people who want you to succeed.**

*   Surround yourself with people who support you and genuinely want to see you succeed. You will push each other to greater heights; each person’s life improves as the others’ lives improve. They won’t tolerate your cynicism, and they will punish you when you mistreat yourself.
*   Don’t associate with people who want to drag you down to make them feel better about themselves.
*   Don’t accept charity cases by helping people who don’t accept personal responsibility for their actions. People who don’t want to improve can’t be helped.

**Rule 4: Judge yourself by your own goals, not by others’.**

*   With mass media, it’s easy to compare yourself to the best of every field (looks, wealth, marriage, career) and think of yourself as miserably outclassed. But modern society is so complex that everyone has different goals - which makes comparing to other people pointless.
*   Drill deeply into your discontent and understand what you want, and why. Define your goals.
*   Transform your goals into something achievable today. If it’s not within your control, look somewhere else. Let every day end a little better than it started.
*   If you do this correctly, you’ll stop being obsessed with other people’s success, because you have plenty to do yourself.

**Rule 5: As a parent, train your children to follow the rules of society.**

*   Children test boundaries of behavior to learn the rules of the world. As a parent, your purpose is to serve as a proxy for society. You must teach the child what is acceptable, and what isn’t.
*   Children who receive no/incorrect feedback will learn the incorrect boundaries of behavior. They will be poorly adjusted and rejected by society, which will severely hamper their happiness. If you don’t teach children the rules, society will punish them for you, far less mercifully.
*   Set the rules, but not too many. Use the minimum necessary force to enforce the rules.

**Rule 6: Before blaming anything else, think: have I done everything within my ability to solve the problem?**

*   It’s easy to blame the outside world, a group of people, or a specific person for your misfortunes. But before you do this, question - **have you taken full advantage of _every_ opportunity available to you?** Or are you just sitting on your ass, pointing fingers?
*   Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today.
*   Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly. Start saying things that make you feel strong. Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.

**Rule 7: Do what is meaningful to you, and you will feel better about existing.**

*   Doing good (preventing evil from happening, alleviating unnecessary suffering) provides your life with meaning. Meaning defeats existential angst; it gratifies your short-term impulses to achieve long-term goals; it makes your life worth living.
*   Think - how can I make the world a little bit better today? Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.
*   Think more deeply - what is your true nature? **What must you become, knowing who you are?** Work toward this.

**Rule 8: Act only in ways in line with your personal truth. Stop lying.**

*   You may lie to others to get what you want; you may lie to yourself to feel better. But deep down you know it’s inconsistent with your beliefs, and you feel unsettled.
    *   Lies can be about how much you enjoy your job; whether you want to be in a relationship; whether you’re capable of something; that a bad habit isn’t that bad for you; that things will magically work out.
*   You must develop your personal truth, and then act only in ways that are consistent with your personal truth.
*   Once you develop your truth, you have a destination to travel toward. This reduces anxiety - having either everything available, or nothing available, are far worse.
*   **Act only in ways that your internal voice does not object to.** Like a drop of sewage in a lake of champagne, a lie spoils all the truth it touches.

**Rule 9: Listen to other people thoughtfully. You’ll learn something, and they’ll trust you.**

*   People talk because this is how they think. They need to verbalize their memories and emotions to clearly formulate the problem, then solve it. **As a listener, you are helping the other person think.** Sometimes you need to say nothing; other times, you serve as the voice of common reason.
*   **The most effective listening technique: summarize the person’s message.** This forces you to genuinely understand what is being said; it distills the moral of the story, perhaps clarifying more than the speaker herself; and you avoid strawman arguments while constructing steelman arguments.
*   Assume that your conversation partner has reached careful, thoughtful conclusions based on her own valid experiences.

**Rule 10: Define your problem specifically. It becomes easier to deal with.**

*   Anxiety usually comes from the unknown. You don’t know what the problem is, or something vague seems really scary. **Specificity turns chaos into a thing you can deal with.**
*   If you had a cancer in your body, wouldn’t you want to know where it is, what it is, and how exactly to treat it? **Why don’t you treat every other problem in your life with the same clarity?**
*   Be precise. What is wrong, exactly? What do you want, exactly? Why, exactly?
*   In interpersonal conflicts, specify exactly what is bothering you. Don’t let it spiral into an inescapable cobweb. If you let everyday resentment gather, eventually it may bubble up and destroy everyone.

**Rule 11: Accept that inequality exists.**

*   Peterson criticizes the postmodern assertion that gender is merely a social construct, and that there are no differences between males and females. He disagrees that there needs to be complete equality, in every behavior and preference, at all times.
*   Instead, Peterson calls for recognition that inequality does exist. Males and females have different natural instincts and different preferences, and we shouldn’t deny that they exist. If we ignore this, we can create policies that force people against their nature, which can have unintended consequences.
*   For example, Peterson feels we’re at risk of “feminizing” young boys by excessively protecting them from danger. Boys by nature are more aggressive. This is biological. They want to prove competence to each other. They want to inhabit that level of risk that pushes them to grow. Let boys be boys.

**Rule 12: Life is tough. Take time to indulge in little bits of happiness.**

*   Life is tough. Good people get hurt. Suffering is pervasive.
*   You can hate the universe for this. Or you can accept that suffering is an undeniable part of existence, and loving someone means loving their limitations. Superman without any flaws is boring and has no story.
*   Notice little bits of everyday goodness that make existence tolerable, even justifiable. Watch the girl splash into a puddle. Enjoy a good coffee. Pet a cat when you run into one.

1-Page Summary

Jordan Peterson has attracted criticism for his remarks around political correctness and free speech. He also has attracted a politically conservative following. Much of this isn’t relevant to benefiting from _12 Rules for Life_ or from this book summary. If you come in skeptical because of his background, we suggest you keep an open mind, since the book’s advice can be genuinely useful to a broad range of people.

We found the book’s chapters inconsistent in quality. Some were clear, well-structured, and had forceful logic. Others were confusing meanderings into philosophy and allegories, reading like wandering streams of consciousness. In this summary, we try to structure the advice in a straightforward way. We reorganize sections from different chapters to fit the same theme.

This means we leave out tangents you might find useful. So as always, if you like the summary, we suggest you read the actual book.

Jordan Peterson is Christian, and he refers to the Bible throughout, but this isn’t a religious book. Instead, he argues that because similar tenets underlie a broad range of religions (Christianity, Buddhism, etc.), our human struggles are universal.

However, _12 Rules for Life_ _is_ based on faith, by which I mean it doesn’t rely so much on data as it does on principles that make intuitive sense. The book doesn’t use randomized controlled trials to prove “not lying to yourself is a good way to improve your life.” But given the complexities in life, not everything can be proven, and often you just have to act according to what you intuit is best. Thus acting out the _12 Rules for Life_ requires a bit of faith.

Shortform Introduction

**Most humans crave order and meaning in their existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world.** For much of history, this function was served by religion, with rules handed down by gods and supernatural surveillance of behavior. Despite differences in the beliefs, all major religions drew on common themes, and the _need_ for rules and order was universal. The ubiquity of this suggests something biological or evolutionary.

The developed world is moving to greater secularism, as a result of: scientific explanations of the world’s uncertainty; critical thinking around religion and the logical impracticality of all religions being true at once; and moral relativism.

But take away religion, and a void remains. There is no scientific code of ethics that inherited the stabilizing role of religion. **In the absence of clear rules and a moral compass, people are prone to nihilism, existential angst, and misery.**

In _12 Rules for Life_, Peterson argues that there _is_ a right and wrong way to conduct your life. In contrast, he rejects the ambiguity of moral relativism, the idea that good and evil are merely matters of subjective opinion and that every belief has its own truth. Moral relativism tolerates all ideas to avoid being “judgmental,” and prevents adults from telling young people how to live. It also rejects thousands of years of development of virtue and how to live properly.

In this vacuum of guidance on how to live, many are drawn to group-centered belief (like political or national allegiance) or ideologies instead, because it gives them identity, purpose, and a shared code of conduct. It simplifies the world.

*   For decades Peterson was bewildered by the question of the Cold War - how could people risk world destruction for their belief systems? He questioned both the fervor of Americans and Communists.
*   He concluded that people adopt shared belief to avoid the negative emotions spurred by chaos. People are willing to fight to protect something that saves them from the existential terror of nihilism.

As a solution, Peterson focuses on **individual responsibility**. The central tenets are:

*   Take responsibility for your own life. Don’t worry about other problems - fix your own first. If everyone did this, many society-level problems would be solved.
*   Walk the line between order and chaos, where life is stable enough but also unpredictable enough to provoke personal growth. In other words, push yourself to the limit of your ability and challenge yourself.
*   Acknowledge that life is suffering. Your goal is to make progress to avoid suffering.
    *   Overprotective adults avoid discussing suffering with their children, with the hope that it will protect them from it. This just makes children unprepared to deal with suffering when they run into it.
*   If we lived properly as described above, we would be resistant to the pains of existence and to the enticing lures of empty ideologies promising safety.

That this book has hit such a chord support the first point, that most people crave order and structure. The rest of the book clarifies the _12 Rules for Life_, with themes of individual responsibility, being truthful to yourself, and defining your own meaning for life.

Introduction

This chapter discusses social status from a biological point of view, and how your body language affects how others perceive you and how you feel about yourself.

### The Biology of Social Status

(This is the most science-heavy chapter, so if you don’t enjoy reading this, don’t worry - the rest of the book isn’t like this.)

Inequality of ability occurs through natural biological variation - within a species, some animals are more capable than others. Those higher in ability command greater resources:

*   Higher position in social hierarchy
*   More advantageous home locations
*   More reproductive interest from higher-quality mates
*   More cooperation with peers and subordinates

Because social status is so important in life outcomes, **you try to figure out where on the social hierarchy you are, you signal that position to other people, and you jockey for a higher position**. Sound familiar? These are deeply evolved, biological behaviors.

*   Even crawfish do this. Two stranger lobsters, placed in the same tank, will within 30 minutes determine the dominant and the subordinate lobster. Their subsequent behaviors match their position - one strutting, claws in the air; the other sulking, dejected, prone to flight.

When a behavior is common among divergent species, the behavior **was strongly selected for in natural selection** and promoted survival in some way.

**The function of this signaling and recognition behavior is to distribute scarce resources between individuals, without the need for costly conflict**.

*   Consider the confrontation between two lobsters sizing each other up. At each stage in conflict, one lobster may yield and opt for subordination.
*   Failing this, the conflict escalates.
    *   First the lobsters examine each other’s claw and body size, and secrete chemicals indicating their health, size, and mood.
    *   Failing this, the lobsters face off, making threatening advances to one another.
    *   Failing this, the lobsters wrestle, trying to flip the other.
    *   Failing this, the lobsters engage in physical combat, using claws to damage body parts.
*   Because actual fighting is risky for both parties, being able to non-violently determine the stronger through signaling is beneficial.
*   Similar animal behaviors:
    *   Elk will wrestle with horns to prove the stronger one.
    *   Defeated wolves will roll over and expose their throats.
*   Among animals, females let the males sort themselves out into a hierarchy, then choose the best individual to mate with.
    *   (Peterson connects this to the romance trope where a large, powerful, aggressive male is subdued and charmed by the female, as in Beauty and the Beast.)

(Shortform note: How is this helpful for survival, especially in the case of the subordinate lobster?

*   Consider an average lobster that refused to defer to every lobster as a rule. In some cases, it would actually be superior, and the other lobster would back off. But sometimes it would have its bluff called by a stronger lobster, and it would be injured or killed. So “knowing your place” prevents injury from conflict, thus promoting survival.
*   Likewise, a supreme alpha lobster would rather avoid conflict, since injury could allow an inferior third lobster to take advantage of the situation. The alpha also doesn’t necessarily want to kill submissive individuals, since they could be useful partners later.
*   From a group perspective, if ability is concentrated unequally, and if a group is best served by following the unequally good people, then hierarchies are useful.)

The neurotransmitter **serotonin** is thought to be the internal mediator of social status. If you feel (or are) dominant in status, more serotonin circulates in your bloodstream. Experimental results that support this:

*   Submissive lobsters have physiologically different serotonin circuits that potentiate differently.
*   Administering SSRIs (antidepressants that increase serotonin levels ) to lobsters makes them adopt the dominant body posture and fight longer before retreating.
*   Low serotonin is associated with less happiness, more illness, and shorter lifespan (Shortform note: though it’s unclear what the causation is - those who are less fit and more prone to illness may naturally have lower status and thus lower serotonin.)
*   (Shortform note: more research results not cited in the book:
    *   If an alpha male is removed from a group and a new male given Prozac inserted, the Prozac male becomes the new alpha consistently.
    *   **Serotonin also seems to improve pro-social behavior and reduces aggression.** This makes sense, since high-status people have much to lose with violence, while low-status ones do not.
    *   In humans, frat leaders have higher serotonin levels than mere members.)

The important point is that **there is a primordial calculator in your brain (the medial prefrontal cortex) that monitors signals to figure out your position in society**. It recognizes how others behave around you, and it infers your social standing. Then, based on where you think you are in the hierarchy, you change your **perceptions, values, emotions, and actions**.

*   If others kowtow to you, you believe you’re higher on the social hierarchy.
*   If others belittle and reject you, you believe you’re lower on the social hierarchy.
*   (Shortform note: There’s an interesting experiment where an alpha male monkey is with a pack of other males, and the submissive behavior of the other males reinforces the alpha’s perception of himself. But if you put the alpha male in front of a one-way mirror, where he can’t see the submissive behavior of other males, he lowers his serotonin. The point is, seeing how others behave toward you is important for figuring out your hierarchy.)

Peterson argues that this perception of your social status affects mental illness.

*   Anxiety
    *   **Lower status people really live in greater threat,** having fewer resources available to deal with problems and emergencies.
    *   This restricts serotonin secretion, which raises stress levels, makes **you more impulsive and reactive to situations - “you must be ready to survive.”**
    *   You jump at more short-term opportunities that appear, not able to put them off for long-term rewards.
*   Depression:
    *   (Shortform note: there’s a hypothesis that depression is so common today because mass media makes you compare yourself to the best of billions of other people. **On this unprecedented world stage, you’re not particularly good at anything.** Even worse, social media makes you compare to the highlight reel of people that you know personally.
    *   In the past, being in a small tribe, you might compare to only 100 people, and you could be the best in the tribe at _something_. **Nowadays, it’s hard to be demonstrably the best at anything, and you may not receive the subordinate signals from anyone else.** Thus one might get locked in depression.)
*   Those in more vulnerable positions, chronically deprived of pleasure, may also be more susceptible to drugs and alcohol.

Finally, through feedback loops, you can become stuck in a low social position. You behave in a subordinate way, which makes others treat you as a subordinate, which makes you feel more subordinate, which makes you behave subordinately. Here’s a concrete example:

*   One infers low social status from the environment, perhaps through bullying or controlling parents.
*   This attracts negative attention from others who treat them as subordinates, which further reinforces self-perception of low status.
*   It also promotes stress, which is physiologically costly and can cause impulsive short-term decisions that lower status.
*   It also encourages behavior that entrenches the low status, like refusing to ask for promotions, which continues to reinforce low social status.

### How Body Language Affects Your Social Status

If all this is true, then to elevate your social status, first **you need to signal your confidence through external body language.** Peterson suggests, “stand up straight, with your shoulders back.” People will perceive you as higher in social status, and they’ll treat you as competent and able. This will then kick off a virtuous cycle - because you’re receiving positive signals from others, you’ll increase your own self-worth, which will make you act even more confidently.

*   Some experiments suggest that **alterations in body language can change mental perception** \- smiling makes you happier, adopting power poses can make you feel more confident.

This begins with your body language, but **you also need to improve self-beliefs. Speak your mind, put your desires forward, and dare to be dangerous.**

*   This is the beginning of developing self-respect, accepting the demands of life, marking your space, and standing up to tyranny.

(Shortform note: This is a variant of “fake it ‘til you make it.” Even if you don’t feel confident, act confidently - others will treat you better, and you will develop real confidence.)

You might worry that all this posturing will make you a target for attack by stronger people. Peterson argues that the _ability_ to respond with aggression decreases the probability that _actual_ aggression will become necessary. In other words, acting confidently is a deterrent to attack.

But fake it ‘til you make it might only go so far. Doesn’t this ignore the problem that there is such a thing as real ability, and that a person’s low social status might be warranted?

*   Peterson acknowledges this, but suggests that there are people who specifically prey on those who behave submissively. This could cause an artificially low perception of status and make it hard to crawl out of your vicious cycle.
*   Instead, if you kick off the change by appearing confident, people will treat you as though you have value. You get positive responses, and this makes you less anxious, which makes you better at conversation and social interaction. As you enjoy things more, you will seek it out more, and so forth.

Rule 1: Fix Your Posture - Others Will Treat You with More Respect

People are better at filling prescriptions for their dogs than for themselves, even though taking drugs is literally life-saving. Why?

_12 Rules for Life_ argues **the root of this is self-loathing** \- that we understand our faults completely, better than any outside observer, and **believe we aren’t worth helping**. No one else has more reason to see you as pathetic. **By withholding something that does you good, you punish yourself for your failings**.

Why do we hate ourselves?

*   He uses the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as the origination of seeing good and evil, and how this original sin carries into us today. After their fall from heaven, they are naked, ugly, ashamed, resentful - why would anyone care for a descendant of Adam and Eve?
*   Also, we know that humans have great capacity for evil, as evidenced by historical atrocities. This increases loathing for mankind and self.

In contrast, our pets and our children are faultless - they don’t know any better, they’re innocent, so they deserve all the help we can give.

The solution is to **believe that you are worth helping. You have a vital mission in this world, you are important in this world to others, and you are morally obligated to take care of yourself.**

*   You are not your own possession to torture and mistreat, because your being is tied up with that of others. Therefore, mistreating yourself will harm others.
    *   Look at all the wonders and comforts of the modern world (electricity, running water, plentiful food), put together by people like you for the benefit of others.
*   You deserve sympathy for merely being alive and shouldering the burden of existence.
*   Reject virtuous self-sacrifice - don’t suffer silently when someone demands more from you than is offered in return. Then you are supporting tyranny.

In other words, see yourself like you see your pet or someone else. You don’t see their faults, and you want to care for them. Treat yourself like the same.

This means taking care of yourself, getting healthier (physically and mentally), expanding your knowledge, pursuing goals you want, articulating your principles.

*   **You must keep the promises you make to yourself**.
*   Think - “**what might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly**?”
*   Having a vision for your life forces you through obstacles toward your goals. Nietzsche: “**He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.**”
*   You know what your personal Hell is like. Decide against going there or creating that.

Minor points from this chapter:

*   In the past our cultural leaders were more concerned with survival than with objective truth, which is why they captured wisdom and subjective experience in stories.
*   Why are people ashamed of nakedness?
    *   This might be a cultural custom to protect our bodies from harm. Yet we get injured rarely these days - why does it persist?
    *   It might also be to [desist straying from your relationship](http://mentalfloss.com/article/21098/why-are-people-ashamed-being-naked). There is more temptation when a person’s body is exposed, and covering it up invites more stability.

Rule 2: Take Care of Yourself, the Way You Would Take Care of Someone Else

Believe that you are worth helping. You have a vital mission in this world, and you are obligated to take care of yourself for the sake of others.

Exercise: Take Care of Yourself

This rule is similar to the adage “you’re the average of your 5 best friends,” with more focus on why you might be hanging around people you know are bad for you.

**Do you have a person you spend a lot of time with, who you feel is dragging you down**, doesn’t support your personal growth, and whose goals don’t align well with yours? Consider why you still spend time with this person, knowing their presence isn’t good for you.

Peterson gives three reasons you might still be with these people.

1) Sometimes, if you feel the person is “beneath you” in status, you may feel like you can rescue this person. But consider the other insidious, malevolent factors that could be at play:

*   Why you stay with this person
    *   **You have a savior complex** \- the idea of rescuing another person boosts your ego and makes you feel virtuous.
    *   **The person’s lower status makes you feel better about your own.** Someone whose marriage is falling apart makes you feel better about your own rocky one. Conversely, it’s intimidating for you to be around people who make you feel less accomplished.
    *   You want to exercise power over someone lower. Possibly because you feel that you are yourself exploited.
    *   The superficial motions of ineffective mentoring distract you from your own unwillingness to pursue a real, meaningful goal.
    *   You’re too weak-willed and indecisive to leave.
*   Why the other person sticks around
    *   They benefit from/exploit your generosity, and when that runs out, they move on to another willing patron.
    *   They want to drag you down to their level.
    *   They may not realize they’re doing this, and want to believe their actions are genuine. This may be to put off the realization that they’ve given up and don’t care about improving.

While some people may really be capable of improving, some aren’t. **People who don’t want to improve can’t be helped.** It’s very difficult to overturn this foundational layer and convince someone to change for the better.

*   Maybe they don’t believe they deserve to be helped, or they don’t go looking for it.
*   They may want to repeat the horrors of their past, sometimes to feel as though they have agency over their suffering, sometimes because there is no alternative.
*   They may want to continue feeling like a victim of life’s horrors, rather than taking personal responsibility for what’s under their control.

All of this is dramatized to the extreme, and Peterson recognizes that if the relationship is genuine and there is sincere desire to improve, then it’s still worth maintaining. But this is hard to accurately assess, so reflect and see if any of the above elements apply to your relationship. **See if the person you’re helping accepts any personal responsibility** - it’s a red flag if they merely see themselves as the victim of endless external causes.

2) This idea of a savior complex might not apply at all. Instead, **you might all be bound by an implicit contract aimed at nihilism and failure**. You’ve all decided to sacrifice the future for the present. Everyone deliberately wastes time, sets no goals, and sabotages themselves. No one mentions it, but everyone knows what the game is. If you feel that you’re ready to adopt a new attitude, then you need to move on from this group.

*   It’s much easier to fall into vice than virtue. Nihilism is easy - “nothing in the world matters, there’s no point to doing anything, so why bother?” It’s easier not to shoulder a burden, not to think, not to care. Pick one or two bad habits and indulge, and you can fall into a deep chasm, a personal hell.

3) Finally, even if everyone’s intentions are good, a negative person’s presence still drags you down. Studies show that **pulling a problematic person into a team lowers the team’s overall efficacy** \- in essence, the team falls to the lowest common denominator.

*   This might be because the high performers may feel resentment at others not carrying their weight, so they lower their performance to match.

Even if the friendship isn’t a charity case, be wary of people who insidiously drag you down. They belittle your personal ambition because they’re embarrassed about lack of their own. They override your accomplishments with their own, real or imaginary.

### Choose Friendships that Are Good for You

**Surround yourself with people who support you and want to see you succeed.** You will push each other to greater heights. Your goals will reinforce the others’ goals, and each person’s life improves as the others’ lives improve. They won’t tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness, and they will punish you when you mistreat yourself.

“Friends” who are destructive will do the opposite. They’ll put down your goals. They’ll be jealous when you succeed, and try to knock down your achievements or one-up with their own. They worry that you’ll outshine them, so they pull you back down the abyss.

Avoid these friendships at all costs.

As you learned in Rule 2, have the friendships that you would advise other people to have. **If you wouldn’t recommend your friendship with someone to your brother, or your parent - why would you have such a friend for yourself?**

Rule 3: Surround Yourself with People Who Want You to Succeed

Surround yourself with people who support you and want to see you succeed.

Exercise: Have Friends Who Want You to Succeed

**With today’s mass media, there is always someone out there better than you in everything you do.** Your career seems boring, you wish your friends were more exciting and more attractive, you’re fatter than your co-workers, and you’re bad at sports. How good can you feel as prime minister of Canada, when someone else is the President of the United States?

As explained in Rule 1, this wasn’t the natural case for hundreds of thousands of years. We used to live in small tribes of hundreds. Chances were you were good at something, and you got serotonin signals from people acknowledging you were good. **Now you might _never_ get positive feedback, while you get tons of negative feedback about people who seem better than you.**

If you compare yourself to other people, you’re using an unfairly harsh standard.

### Bad Solutions

People react to high standards in a variety of ways.

The solution isn’t to simply reject all standards. Standards _are_ useful to guarantee a level of quality (like building bridges) and to keep pushing us up to better things. Being unsatisfied with your present world is a useful push to improve your situation. But setting unrealistically high standards can also lead to crushing, chronic self-criticism, where you feel you aren’t capable of doing anything.

The solution also isn’t nihilism and hopelessness. Don’t think, “there will always be people better than me, so what’s the point? The world’s going to end in a billion years if not a million - why does what I do matter?” Peterson argues that this is a cheap trick - pick a time frame long enough, and nothing matters. This is an unreliable, worthlessly simplistic way to look at life.

The solution also isn’t to protect people from the idea that they have ways to improve, and that standards do exist. Throughout the 20th century, American culture took on the delusionally positive thinking of constant praise for kids. Trophies for everyone, you’re all special and capable of everything you want to do. This merely blinds people to the truth, and when reality hits, people are unprepared to deal with it.

### Set Your Own Goals

Instead of judging yourself by other people’s yardsticks, you need to set your own. You need **a total reworking of your goals**, starting with understanding yourself as though you were a stranger. There are 3 steps:

#### Step 1: Take a broader view of your existence and of other people.

You’ve likely identified a single, arbitrary dimension as THE single most important thing to achieve - like money, fame, or status - and you feel miserable that you don’t have it.

But your existence is **multidimensional**. You have a lot of components to your existence - family, friends, personal projects, hobbies. **Judge your success across all the games you play.** Your existence is so unique and customized to you, that you can’t easily compare yourself to any other individual.

Furthermore, there isn’t a binary condition of “success” vs “failure.” There are many gradations in between. **What matters is whether you can get better, not whether you can achieve binary success.**

Finally, you’re likely only seeing the highlight reel from other people. They don’t expose their deep problems and failing. **You’re likely overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.** Even the very people you envy might secretly envy you, in ways you’re not aware.

#### Step 2: Drill deeply into your discontent and understand yourself.

The first absolute requirement: **you need to genuinely want your life to improve.** You can’t fool yourself. If you don’t want this, you won’t be able to improve.

*   (Shortform suggestion: If you’re stuck here, then think more about why you don’t want to improve. Recall from Rule 2 that you might have self-loathing and believe you don’t deserve to improve. If so, treat yourself like you would another person, and be lighter in your judgment of yourself.)

Next, you’re likely discontent about not having something (like money, a particular job, an achievement). Drill into your discontent and transform it. **What do you want? _Why_ do you feel this way?** (Shortform suggestion: Keep asking why until you can’t answer it anymore. Then you’ll hit the foundation of why you feel this way.)

As you question yourself, you may realize that there are multiple conflicting desires at play. List them all out, realize the conflict between them, then prioritize them into a list.

**Is the subject of your discontent within your control? If not, look somewhere else. Find something you can fix.**

You may find some of your desires to be rooted in bitterness and resentment. How do you transform your goal so that you remove bitterness and resentment? What if you didn’t have to improve yourself at other people’s expense? What if you could achieve your goal, while also making your friends, even your enemies happier?

Finally, realize you may have to give up old goals to find a new direction.

(Shortform note: These are abstract pointers, so let’s work through an example in more detail than the book does. Say you really want your boss’s job. You’re miserable day-to-day because you can’t stand to see your incompetent boss doing a job that should be yours. You believe that if only you got your boss’s job, you’d be happy forever.

Then keep asking why you want your boss’s job. You may find a surprising variety of desires at play:

*   You want better status. Why?
    *   Because you enjoy when other people see you with higher social status.
*   You want to make more money. Why?
    *   Because it allows you to better take care of your family.
    *   Because money is the yardstick by which you measure people’s value.
*   You want fairness. More capable people should be rewarded accordingly, and it’s unfair for less deserving people to get more.
*   You want to do good work with higher responsibility. Why?
    *   Because you want to serve the world, and having a higher title lets you accomplish more.
*   You dislike your boss as a person. You want to see him fail in return for all that he’s taken from you.

That’s a lot of desires, and it’s much more complicated than “I want my boss’s job.” You can only produce a list like this by thinking deeply.

Now that you’ve listed them, you can then prioritize which ones are most important to you.

Then you can notice the conflicts between them:

*   You want to serve the world, and you see yourself as a good person. But at the same time, you want to see your boss fail. Could you define a new goal, that allows you to avoid this bitterness?

Finally, what can you do to achieve your most important desires?

*   If getting your boss’s job is within your control and you still desire it, how could you do so?
*   If not, how could you achieve all your other goals another way? Maybe by applying to a new role within the company, or a new job?

While Peterson doesn’t go into his example anywhere near this length, we believe it correctly applies his thinking.)

While you do this exercise, realize that you’re blind and can’t see yourself honestly. **You’re blind to what goals you really want because you’re focusing on something very narrow.** You’ve obsessed over a narrow goal for a long time, so it’ll take an adjustment period to see the bigger picture.

*   In general, you can’t even understand fully how your brain works, since it’s been shaped by millions of years of development that you’re not aware of.
*   Analogy to vision: our retinas have a narrow central section with high acuity (the fovea) - everything else is blurred. Similarly in life, you’re focusing on something very narrow and ignoring everything else of value.

#### **Step 3: Transform your goal into something achievable.**

You might have big goals, and that’s good. But break it down to something tractable you can do today. Then you’ll start building ever upwards.

Aim small, then grow your ambition.

*   **What one thing in your life can you fix right now?**
*   Let things in your life at the end of the day be a little better than they were this morning.
*   Do that for a month, then three months, then three years, and now you’re aiming for the stars.

Negotiate with yourself and honor your commitments.

*   Pretend you’re working for your own internal boss. After you finish, the boss complains it’s not good enough and asks for 10x the work. Would you work for a tyrant like this?
*   No - make yourself a deal (eg reward for doing something), and feel good about it after you finish.

Continue to pay attention.

*   Once you start looking at your new goal, you’ll start seeing new things you were blind to before - new information, opportunities.

---

Once you put this into practice, you’ll improve how you feel about your self-worth and comparing yourself to other people.

*   You don’t get jealous of someone else’s success, because you know life has a lot of factors, everyone’s playing their own game, and that person might not have it better than you.
*   You don’t get frustrated with your lack of immediate success, since you know you need to make small steps and be patient.
*   You’re less obsessed with other people’s success, because you have more than enough to do yourself.

Ultimately, Peterson believes the answer to nihilism is the “essential goodness of Being.” This comes from aiming for a meaningful goal that improves the lives of people and for a long time. There is beauty to create and order to make in the world. There’s evil to defeat and misery to soothe.

Rule 4: Judge Yourself by Your Own Goals, Not by Others’

Instead of judging yourself by other people’s standards, redefine your goals to find a new way to measure yourself.

Exercise: Judge Yourself in a New Way, Part 1

Finish redefining your goals to find a new way to measure yourself.

Exercise: Judge Yourself in a New Way, Part 2

Children aren’t born ready for life. This is partly a biological compromise with head size - too big of a head wouldn’t fit through a woman’s birth canal. This is also partly because much of human culture isn’t written in our genes - culture has developed faster than biological evolutionary cycles. Instead, as children age, they develop physically, and they also learn a lot about how the human world works.

**This means children need training and feedback to understand how to navigate human society.** If you’re a typical parent, you want your children to succeed, and helping your children become well-liked, functioning members of society is a key part of success.

Children, curious and exploratory as they are, **constantly test limits to figure out where the boundaries are**. When they get corrective feedback, they understand where the boundary is. “I now know it’s not OK to throw food on the floor on a restaurant, because my mom yelled at me for it.”

Furthermore, while it’s tempting to think of them as cherubic angels, they have capacity for evil inside them. They will not bloom into perfection if left to their own devices. So if they hit you or yell in supermarkets, and you don’t provide corrective feedback, they’ll think it’s ok. They’ll learn the wrong boundaries of society. Then when they become adults, they’ll be poorly adjusted to function in broader society.

### Parents Who Fail to Teach their Kids

**Many parents, in a misguided effort to avoid damaging their child or wanting to be their child’s friend, avoid giving corrective feedback to their kids.** These are the parents who let their kids curse at them in public or scream disruptively in movie theaters. These parents are teaching their kids the wrong boundaries of society, and in effect they’re outsourcing the training to society. “Here’s my kid - society, please teach him the right rules.”

The problem is that **society doesn’t care about your child nearly as much as you do.** If _you_ dislike your own child at times, imagine how other people will react. Other people will swiftly judge and punish your child mercilessly, with nowhere near the tolerance and patience that you have for your child. Here are examples of how a poorly socialized child will be rejected by society:

*   In school, other children will refuse to spend time around a temperamental, unsociable child.
*   Teachers will run out of patience and focus attention on more pleasant children, causing your child to fall behind.
*   Parents will refuse your child’s presence at their playtimes.
*   If these habits persist into adulthood, employers will fire them; relationship partners will reject them.

You are your child’s best shot at teaching society’s rules. Society doesn’t have the patience to teach your child - there are many other well-adjusted, functioning people to spend time on. A bad kid will simply be rejected and left behind.

And this problem can get worse throughout a child’s life. An early poor social experience can set up a **vicious cycle of chronic maladjustment** \- a maladjusted child will act poorly; she will receive negative feedback from the world, often without understanding why; she will withdraw and feel rejected, causing anxiety, depression, and resentment. This further receives negative feedback from the world. This can last for a lifetime.

Shielding your child from corrective feedback is in effect crippling them in the long run. And early exposure matters - a child not taught to behave properly by age 4 will have lasting social difficulties.

### Teach Your Child What’s Acceptable and What Isn’t

**As a parent, your purpose is to serve as a proxy for society.** You teach the child what is acceptable, and what isn’t.

**Think not about having your child avoid all pain, but rather to maximize their learning at minimal cost.** In other words, some amount of pain early on will save a lot of pain throughout the child’s life. Don’t protect your kids - make them as competent as you can.

Teaching children the rules should be done with **both rewards and punishment** - leaving one out removes a tool from your toolkit (most parents omit punishment). Punishments and negative emotions are natural, evolved reactions to events - sadness and shame train people to avoid the situation that led to those painful emotions.

Also, a good reward program requires **continuous vigilance**, since the behavior needs to be reinforced quickly with the reward. The right reward structure doesn’t work if it’s not correctly applied continuously with the child.

In _12 Rules for Life_, Peterson has 4 principles for raising kids:

1.  **Set the rules, but not too many.**
    *   Some suggestions - don’t bite, kick, or hit. Don’t torture and bully other children. Eat in a civilized way, so other people are pleased to have you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they will feel eager to teach you. Be good company so that you’re invited to fun.
2.  **Use the minimum necessary force. Escalate only if necessary.**
    *   Start with a glare, then verbal admonishment, then a time out, then taking away belongings - escalating until they get the point.
    *   Physical punishment may be necessary, depending on the child.
    *   A patient adult can defeat a two-year-old, because time lasts forever when you’re two.
    *   When they comply, give them a reward, like a pat on the head or a compliment.
3.  **Parenting is best done with a partner.**
    *   Raising young children is demanding, and it’s easy for one parent to make a mistake. Another parent helps cover for the other and limit overreactions.
    *   Peterson acknowledges that single parents have an admirably difficult life, but we shouldn’t pretend that all family forms are equally good. Two good parents are better than one.
4.  **Understand your own capacity for anger and revenge.**
    *   You might think that you have infinite patience and love for your child, but you don’t - not if your child dominates you.
    *   If you don’t discipline your child, you’ll start resenting your child. A vicious cycle can result where you punish them subtly (eg don’t show them attention), which then breeds resentment in the child, which causes them to seek vengeance more aggressively, which causes you to resent them more, and so forth. Before you know it, your family has a schism that’s hard to repair.

Rule 5: As a Parent, Train Your Children to Follow the Rules of Society

**There is inevitable suffering in life.** People are born unequal in ability and attributes. Disaster strikes unpredictably - cancer, a car accident, a mass layoff. You never get quite exactly what you want. Life seems like an unfair joke.

**One response to this is anger at the universe** or, if you’re religious, at your god. More extremely, this becomes misanthropic thinking, or hating humankind. Then some convert this into the action of vengeance, to express their outrage and spite the universe/god. Peterson argues this underlay the beliefs of the Columbine killers, who sought to punish those who had wronged them.

But **there is still potential for redemption, to learn from misfortune and do good despite it**. Many people who suffered child abuse by their parents perpetuate the evil and abuse their own children; but most choose not to. Despite the suffering you bear, you have the potential to overturn it and make the world better.

**Before blaming the universe for your misfortunes, first consider - what personal responsibility did you have in your misfortune? Did you do everything within your power to improve your situation, or did you passively sabotage yourself by letting bad things happen to you?**

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served as a Russian soldier in WWII. He was then arrested and imprisoned by his own people. He got cancer. His misfortunes seemed out of his control. Then he wrote _The Gulag Archipelago_, at great risk to himself, to expose Soviet prison camps and the flaws of Lenin’s thinking. He realized his unquestioning support of the Communist Party contributed directly to his misery, and he decided to correct his mistake.

Look at it this way - **if your suffering is your own fault, then you can actually _do something_ about it.** If, in contrast, it’s entirely the universe’s fault, then reality itself is flawed, and you are perpetually doomed, and you have absolutely no ability to change that. Which worldview would you rather have?

Often, disasters could have been prevented with the right mindset. Peterson argues lack of preparation is a sin. When times are good, we get complacent and forget our commitments and responsibilities. Then when disaster strikes, we omit our personal responsibility in causing it. We may learn our lesson temporarily and make empty promises to improve, but inevitably we forget, and so the cycle repeats.

*   The New Orleans flood, Peterson argues, could have been prevented with legislation passed in 1965. By Katrina in 2005, only 60% of the work had been done. In contrast, the Netherlands protects its borders with dams built to withstand a once-in-10,000-year storm.

Before blaming the universe, or a political faction, or an enemy, put your own house in order. **Have you taken full advantage of every opportunity available to you?** Are you working hard at your career? Your relationships? Outside of work to improve yourself?

**Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today.** Stop when you feel when an inkling that you should stop. **Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly; start saying things that make you feel strong.** Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.

A nice quote from the book: “If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”

As you continue doing this, you will continue discovering further wrongs that you can right. Your life will become simpler and more honorable. You’ll stop filling your head with lies and resentment. Then you might see existence as naturally good and worth maintaining. You’ll become resistant to the trials and misfortunes that do appear. And imagine if all people did this - how magnificent would the world be then?

Rule 6: Think: Have I Done Everything Within My Ability?

Before blaming the universe for your misfortunes, first consider what you can do about it.

Exercise: Do Everything Within Your Ability

So suffering in life is inevitable. The universe can be unfair. In a hundred million years, nothing we do will likely matter. What does one do in the face of this knowledge?

One response is to take the expedient path. Indulge short-term pleasures and put off long-term commitments. Do what feels the best today - indulge your basest desires all the time. Even lie, cheat, and steal to get what you want. Do these things even if you know it makes your future self worse off than better.

Of course, **we _know_ this is what we _shouldn’t_ be doing.** We know we should be doing the hard things today to make our lives better in the future. **We should suppress our immediate impulses to bring future rewards**, like studying today and putting off partying to build the career we really want.

One obstacle is our powerful biological instincts - they kept us alive in the Stone Age, but they’re counterproductive today (overeating 100,000 years ago helped us survive a period of famine; today it leads to obesity). But on a **higher conscious level**, it’s hard to answer: why? How do we define what’s good and worth doing, and what isn’t?

In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson tackles it this way: it seems intuitively true that certain things can be defined as Evil - most abhorrently, conscious human malevolence. Auschwitz, mass shootings, enslavement, knowing torment of others - these are all things most people believe are bad, even without having to read a philosophy book. You likely believe the world is better off without these things happening.

If there is such a thing as Evil, then **Good must be the antithesis of Evil - Good is whatever stops Evil from happening.** Good alleviates unnecessary pain and suffering.

In the most extreme of cases, literally fighting evil is good - as typified in the Union’s antislavery stance in the Civil War, and the Allies’ anti-Holocaust stance in World War II. But all actions exist on a spectrum, and resolving even little bits of bad are good. This could mean counseling a friend to get out of a bad situation. This could mean improving your own health, so that you have more ability and time to do good. This could mean empowering others to do good - even by helping people understand what good and evil are, like Peterson is doing.

**Doing good has Meaning.** When you act with Meaning, you will attain more security and strength than would be granted by a short-sighted concern for your own security. **What you do will matter to you. In turn, you’ll feel better about your existence**, and the evils and injustices of the world are more tolerable, because you know they can be overcome. Remember Socrates who, believing his principles to be right, retained the strength to speak truth at his trial and accepted his death with resolve.

If you’re the type to bemoan your existence, Peterson argues doing good is the salve - by doing good, you are compensating for the sins of your existence and those of humankind.

Meaning is the mature substitute for expedience. Expedience rejects responsibility; it doesn’t have the wisdom or sophistication to look ahead and plan carefully; it has no courage or sacrifice; it’s the easy way out. Meaning regulates impulses and recognizes the value of making the world better. **By providing deeper meaning, Meaning gratifies all impulses.**

Ask yourself - **how can I make the world a little bit better today?** Aim upwards. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.

Even more deeply - what is your true nature? **What must you become, knowing who you truly are?** How can you make the world a LOT better, if only you made certain changes in your life? Something valuable, given up, ensures future prosperity.

**The greater the change you want to make, the greater the sacrifice might be.** Inverting the question - what is the greatest sacrifice you can make, that of what you love most - and what good will come of it? In so doing, you change the structure of reality in your favor.

---

The above is his main point in the chapter, but Peterson also discusses two other topics:

### The Historical Rise and Fall of Meaning

Self-sacrifice and delayed gratification have been part of human teachings for a long time, and the discovery of its utility goes back even further. Picture in the Stone Age that a tribe brings down a mammoth, and they engorge themselves until they can’t possibly eat any more. But then they have leftover food. They learn that they can go through the labor of preserving the food today for the benefit of having food tomorrow. Even better, they can give this food to a neighboring tribe and expect a return of favor in the future.

These sacrificial behaviors promoted survival, and they gradually became ritualized and dramatized, customs inherited through generations. They became enshrined in moral narratives and religious texts, like the Temptation of Christ. Wandering through the desert for 40 days and nights, Satan tempts Jesus with hedonism (relieving hunger by creating his own bread), egoism (jumping off a peak and relying on God to save him), and materialism (ruling the kingdoms of Earth). Jesus rejects all these temptations of evil and immediate gratification. Instead, he reaches for a higher goal, of transcending desires to do good.

(Shortform note: In one interpretation, these temptations are different paths for Jesus to become a Messiah by demonstrating supernatural powers. He can easily alleviate physical hardships; he can relieve Roman oppression by seizing the kingdoms. Jesus rejects these options - he wants to undergo his trials without powers that ordinary humans don’t have, in effect becoming a practical role model for humans. Instead of making bread for everyone, **he sets an example of a practice that can _forever_ solve the problem of hunger for everyone - rejection of immediate gratification and the temptations of evil**.)

Despite its tremendous influence, Christianity had a few problems that limited its reach in the modern day:

*   It failed to sufficiently address the problem of suffering in the present day (“why would God allow this atrocity to happen?”), which helped give rise to science and alchemy.
*   People felt Jesus had already died to relieve all of mankind’s sins, thus freeing people from personal moral obligation.
*   Protestant belief switched from salvation by works to salvation by faith.
    *   In Catholic belief (and that of other denominations), both faith and works are necessary for salvation. However, this raised an issue of how to assess “worthiness,” and allowed kings to see themselves as morally superior to their subjects.
    *   The Protestant switch was meant partially as an expression of equality between all people - salvation comes from faith alone. However, this move devalued effort in this life, since one couldn’t earn salvation anyway.

Nietzsche argues that humans killed God, and they would have to invent their own values in the aftermath. However, ideologies like fascism and communism filled the void instead.

In _12 Rules for Life_, Peterson argues that the individual must be constrained and molded by a disciplinary structure before she can act freely and competently. As secularism rose, a void in disciplinary structure grew; filling it was nihilism and susceptibility to new utopian ideas, like fascism. Hence he wrote this book to provide a reworked structure for people to follow.

### Order and Chaos

Chaos is unexplored territory. It’s the things and situations we don’t understand. It’s where you go when you get fired; it’s the threatening stranger on the street; it’s the scary audacious goal you’ve wanted. It’s also the realm of possibility and where new ideas form.

Order is explored territory. It’s stability and structure. It’s your plan for the next day, the comfort of tradition, the customs we use to treat each other. Yet it also can mean concentration camps, fascism, and, less extremely, personal stasis and lack of growth.

We like being in Order. We don’t like when we are forced to leave Order for Chaos, like when tragedy strikes, when you’re cheated on by your partner, or when you’re fired.

But Order isn’t enough - there are still vital things to be learned. **The ideal place is to be right in the middle. To have enough Order to feel tethered, but enough Chaos to be challenged and learn new things.** This is where meaning is to be found.

Rule 7: Do What is Meaningful, and You Will Feel Better About Existing

This rule discusses not only lying to others, but also lying to yourself and obscuring your personal truth. Instead, you need to develop your personal truth, then act consistently with it. This chapter is fairly abstract, but try to see if its principles resonate with a specific problem you have in life.

### Why You Lie

Day to day, **you may lie to the outside world to get what you want and to avoid pain**. You tell lies to appear more competent, to gain status, to be well-liked, to prevent conflict. This is you manipulating the world.

**On a deeper level, you may lie to yourself about what you want**. You might have a dream life envisioned by your younger self, without probing carefully into whether you really want it (career and retirement goals are common examples here). You may entertain ideas about what you really want, but deceive yourself into thinking they’re impossible to reach or undesirable after all. You then act in ways that you paper over with more lies, but deep down you know it’s inconsistent with your beliefs, and you feel unsettled.

Beware of the big lie (in Hitler’s terms) something so large and audacious that you cannot accept someone would intentionally fabricate it. This could be about who to blame for your faults, or what you should do with your life.

You may not be actively misleading other people, but **merely lying by omission. This isn’t any better.** If your boss does something you dislike, not confronting her about it is still lying - you’re acting inauthentically, not in accordance with your beliefs. If you habitually avoid conflict, don’t complain when mistreated, and suppress your own ideas, you’re still lying to yourself. This makes you feel weak, because your existence has little real meaning. **You’ve become a tool to be used, obliterating your independence.**

Even worse, on a meta level, **you may be in _denial_ about lying to yourself**. You may believe that your truth is the only truth, and that no amount of new knowledge can change what you believe. That all important facts have been discovered, and that everything will work out perfectly.

Your lie may begin with protecting yourself from reality. You may believe reality is intolerable and must be distorted. You want to avoid that short-term pain. But after a certain point, **the lies take on a life of their own**.

*   First you start with a little lie, then support it with further little lies.
*   Then you distort your thinking to avoid shame of those lies.
*   Then those lies become necessary and become ritualized into unconscious action.
*   **The longer you lie, the more you believe it, and the harder it is to undo.**

All the lying may work in the short term, but ultimately you will run into failure. **If you betray yourself, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, adversity will bulldoze you.** By failing to react the first time, you’ve already trained yourself to tolerate things you disagree with.

This leads to bitterness. Because you are avoiding pain and fabricating your world, you are likely to avoid personal responsibility for your failures. You will blame the world as unfair, and other people as getting in your way. It’s not hard to take this one step further to believing “they must be stopped,” and another step further into revenge.

**All this applies to many levels of existence.** You may be lying to yourself:

*   About what you want to do with the rest of your life.
*   That you enjoy a job that actually bites against your being.
*   That you continue relationships you know are toxic, under the guise of convenience or comfort.
*   That you’re not capable of something, that it’s not worth trying, even though deep down you know you really want it.
*   That a bad habit really isn’t that bad, or actually good for you.
*   That things will get better on their own and things will magically work out without your involvement.
*   That you know what you’re doing in life, when really you’re too scared to confront uncertainty.

Clearly telling lies to yourself leads to bad outcomes and misery. What do you do?

### How to Tell the Truth

#### Step 1) Develop your personal truth.

Figure out what you really want and why. If you don’t know what you want, you can start with tradition and work from there. **Your truth is truly personal to you, based on you and your circumstances.**

**Ambitions based around developing character and ability are better than status and power.** You can lose status, sometimes in ways out of your control; but no matter what happens, you carry character whereever you go.

(Shortform note: because people have different truths, naturally people should have different goals. And as we learned in Rule 4, this means comparing yourself to other people is pointless.)

Confronting the idea that you’ve been lying to yourself will likely be painful. Error requires sacrifice to correct it. The larger the error, the larger the sacrifice you need. This may mean accepting weaknesses you didn’t want to confront earlier. It may mean having conflicts with people you were lying to before. This is the cost of getting on the right track, but it’s worth it.

**Once you develop a personal truth, it gives you a destination to travel toward.** It gives you a personal code of conduct to act by. Having a personal truth reduces anxiety, because having either everything or nothing available are far worse options.

#### **Step 2) Act only consistently with your personal truth**.

Speak in a way that makes you feel strong, not weak. **Act only in ways that your internal voice does not object to.** A lie spoils all the truth it touches, like a tiny drop of sewage in a bottle of wine.

**Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today.** Stop when you feel an inkling that you should stop. **Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly; start saying things that make you feel strong.** Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.

Stand up for your beliefs. If you say yes when you want to say no, you weaken your resolve and become habituated to violating your beliefs. You will lack the strength when you really need it. Instead, **when you say no, you transform yourself into someone who _can_ say no when it needs to be said.** Nietzsche said that “the strength of a person’s spirit” is “measured by how much truth he could tolerate...to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened.”

#### Step 3) Keep an open mind to new information and keep adjusting your truth.

**Be willing to learn from what you don’t know.** While tradition is a good start, it may no longer apply if the circumstances have truly changed. Putting yourself in new situations will literally grow your brain. Transform your values as you progress.

\====

Again, all of this applies to many levels of existence.

*   From the deepest level, it means defining what you want to do with your life, and shifting your time and energy to achieving progress in that direction.
*   It means defining what kinds of relationships you want with people, and reconstructing ones that don’t meet your wants.
*   It means doing something about things you disagree with in the world - how a country is moving, a policy your employer enacts, how you see a stranger treat another stranger.
*   It means telling your friend or partner what you really think, at the expense of a conflict for a longer-term gain.

**What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth. At the very least, you will be trusted for being honest, and you’ll feel the strength that comes with authenticity.**

Rule 8: Act Only in Line With Your Personal Truth - Stop Lying

Learn to stop lying to yourself and others. Develop a personal truth to live by.

Exercise: Tell Your Truth

We’ve all been in situations where someone seems to be talking endlessly, and we’re tempted to disengage.

But take a more generous view of the situation. **People talk because this is how they think.** They explore past events, discover how they feel about it, simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. They can figure out what stupid things they shouldn’t do, then not do them. They formulate the problem they are struggling with, before designing a solution. You’re doing them a favor by listening.

Some people are capable of thinking alone and have internal conversations with themselves. This is more difficult than talking out loud with another person - it requires you to model other points of view (in effect being multiple people at the same time), have the models disagree, and resolve the disagreement. This is demanding, requiring you to tolerate conflict and adjust your perceptions of the world internally.

Thus, **many people prefer to talk to a listener. They organize their brains with conversation.**

Thus rises the classic stereotype in how men and women treat conversation differently. Women want to converse as a mode of thinking, going over their day and struggles they’ve faced. In response, men want to design efficient solutions and move on. **Rushing this process robs the speaker of their ability to think**, and it signals that you dismiss the importance of what the speaker has to say. Instead, the speaker feels a need to formulate the problem in conversation. **They need to be listened to and questioned to ensure clarity in the formulation. Only then is there a problem that is solvable.**

**As a listener, you are helping the other person think.** True listening is paying attention and accepting what the person has to say.

*   Sometimes, you don’t really have to say anything - the person solves her own problem merely by speaking aloud. Just by giving sympathetic responses, you signal that you value the speaker, that her experiences are important and deserving of consideration.
*   Other times, you serve as the voice of common reason, helping ground the person and revealing what the other person is ignoring.

In effect, we stay sane by talking to other people. People who listen and engage in conversation help us figure out our problems.

*   (In connection with Rule 5 about parenting, Peterson argues this is why parents have an ethical obligation to raise their children to be socially acceptable - a child who is rejected by society reduces willing conversation partners, which can lead to madness.)

**If you listen without premature judgment, people will tend to trust you and tell you everything they’re thinking.**

### Listening Can Teach You Valuable Things

Listening to someone else can often be helpful in improving your own life. **It’s far better to learn from another person’s experiences and mistakes than to suffer them yourself.**

Therefore, **approach each conversation with the belief that your current knowledge is imperfect.** After all, if your life isn’t perfect right now, this must be true - you must not have all the answers.

Therefore, go into every conversation with the idea that you have something to learn from this, that the other person’s experiences are valuable. Without genuinely believing this, you will find it difficult to carry a fulfilling conversation.

(Shortform note: this is why conversations with certain people can always feel frustrating - neither party believes they can learn anything from the other, so it’s just two people trying to talk over each other.)

### How to Listen Well

The best conversations occur when all parties are listening to each other, trying to solve a problem together, and build to a synthesis greater than what each person started out with. All act with the premise that they have something to learn. This constitutes active philosophy. Everyone leaves with an improved worldview and better knowledge of their conversation partners.

As a comparison, these are **common examples of poor listening** that lead to lack of connection and synthesis:

*   Trying to jockey for status in the social hierarchy - a game of one-upsmanship in telling a better story or appearing to have a better life.
*   Monologues enforcing one’s viewpoint without opening paths for replies. These are often meant to _shut off_ thinking in the listener.
*   Absentmindedly thinking about what to say next, rather than addressing what is being said
*   Stubbornly disregarding what is being said, out of fear of changing your opinion

Sound familiar? We all do this at one point or another, often to great discontent.

**Here is the most effective listening technique: summarize the person’s message.** Say something like, “let me make sure I have this right - what I’m hearing is **\_\_**.” This has very helpful effects:

*   You take the time to genuinely understand what is being said, rather than skirting over it on the surface.
*   You give the person a chance to correct what you said, or emphasize something you didn’t. This improves your understanding of the other person.
*   You extract the moral of the story, discarding the meandering paths that are a natural consequence of thinking aloud. This forms a successful, lightweight memory for the listener.
*   You avoid strawman arguments. Normally you might pick up a single element and distort it to absurdity. This is obviously counterproductive. If you understand the core of what is being said, you will more likely find the value in it.
*   You strengthen your arguments further against challenge. By stating your opponent’s viewpoint better than she can, you build a steelman (as opposed to a strongman). If you can successfully defeat the steelman, you can develop even stronger, more well-reasoned beliefs.

Assume that your conversational partner has reached careful, thoughtful conclusions based on her own valid experiences. Assume that they want to engage with you as a voice of reason, not oppress you. Reflect their viewpoints back to them, and only then share your own viewpoint.

### Other Tips for Conversations

A tip for resolving arguments: When you argue with someone and reach a dead end, take time to separate and sit alone. Each person should think, “What have I done to contribute to what we’re arguing about? I made a mistake somewhere, even if it’s small or far away.” Then when you get back together, admit your mistakes.

Good lectures are actually conversations that happen to be given to many _individuals_ at once. As a public speaker, you should talk _with individuals_. Make eye contact with a specific person, note her confusion or acceptance, and modify your conversation accordingly. Then switch to another audience member.

Rule 9: Listen to Other People Thoughtfully - You’ll Learn Something

When you have a problem, there is often the temptation to paper it over, to think the problem will go away by itself. It’s easier to keep the peace and avoid the anxiety, despair, sadness that will come with confronting your problems. **It’s easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist than to admit it does and the pain that accompanies it.**

Maybe you hate going into work everyday. Maybe you can’t stand the way your partner chews. Maybe you stare blankly at the ceiling each morning, unable to drag yourself out of bed. Maybe you feel a simmering level of rage throughout the day. You don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s more pleasant not to think too hard about it and try to get through another day.

Left unaddressed, this will gradually build until it leads to a catastrophic failure. You will regret not having acted sooner.

**Specificity turns chaos into a thing that you can deal with.** If you have a vague unease, you will struggle with it until **you define it explicitly and give it a concrete form**. Once you precisely identify the issue, you will likely realize that you were far more afraid than you should have been, and you now have a specific target to confront.

If you have a cancer somewhere in your body, wouldn’t you want to know where and what it is as soon as possible, so you can do something about it? **Why don’t you treat every other problem in your life with the same urgency and clarity?**

**Give structure to the chaos through specific speech**. If you speak carefully and precisely, you can make order from the chaos, develop a new goal, and navigate to it.

Precision sorts out the uniquely terrible thing from all the other, equally terrible things that did _not_ happen. If you have a pain in your abdomen, you start with a vague set of terrifying possibilities. Then you go to the doctor, who collapses the possibilities into a single, clear diagnosis. You feel less anxiety, certain now that it’s addressable, and you laugh at your previous anxiety. **Why are your other concerns and problems any different?**

You cannot move in life without aiming at a direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will make you disappointed and frustrated and resentful.

Be precise. **What is the problem, exactly? What do you want, exactly? Why, exactly?**

Endure the sharp pain of specificity and confrontation instead of the chronic vague dull ache of negligence. Once you identify it, things will get better.

### Interpersonal Conflicts

Many issues of this sort have to do with interpersonal relations, particularly with your romantic partner. Communicating what you really think risks immediate negative emotion - resentment, jealousy, frustration, hatred. So it’s easy just to pretend you’re a saint, try to move on, that “it’s not worth fighting about.”

**In a marriage, there is little that is not worth fighting about.** Do you really want an annoyance tormenting you every day of your marriage, for the decades? All it takes to invite disaster is to do nothing.

The longer you wait, the more the little problems form a thick interrelated cobweb. Each small unresolved resentment piles onto the next one, aggregating into a ball of hate. Sometimes the person you resent is totally unaware that you’re resentful. You behave poorly, which makes the other person react poorly, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle. Each argument becomes difficult to extricate from all the other problems - hence the stereotypical couple’s argument digging up grievances from years past.

Instead, **specify exactly what is bothering you**. Share this with the person. It’s far better to do this earlier than later. If you let everyday resentment gather, it may eventually bubble up and destroy everyone.

**Focus the argument only on the specific thing that is bothering.** Both people should promise just to solve _just that one issue_ - the other problems will have their due time, so don’t unearth them or get distracted.

One by one, you reveal and solve each issue. You clear the cobweb that was once impenetrable.

(Shortform suggestion: As you discuss, **keep asking why**. You can’t clean out a dental cavity without digging out all the rot from the very bottom. Maybe she finds his laugh annoying (why?), because she doesn’t want him to be happy when she isn’t (why?), because she thinks he held her back from her ambition when they agreed to focus on _his_ career, but she now regrets it (why?), because she saw how it ate at her mother and ruined her parents’ marriage, and now she feels guilty about not being stronger as a person.

Now she sees it’s not really about his laugh, but about far deeper issues. These issues are hard to fix and take time - but it’s far better to know what the issue is, than to ignore it and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.)

### The World in Abstraction

We have a tendency not to dig into things because it makes our lives easier. Day to day we perceive the world with vast simplifications, happily unaware of the complexities underlying the surface. We perceive only what is enough for our plans to work and for us to get by.

When everything works according to plan, we don’t need to peer under the surface. We drive a car, indifferent to how an engine transmits power to the wheels, the labor that produced the car, the electricity that powers the street lamps. We just care that the car functions to get us from point A to point B. We abstract away the world to simplify our lives, because there is too much complexity to understand in ways that aren’t immediately useful.

**When the world doesn’t work properly, you _have to_ peer into this complexity.** This is chaos. Chaos provokes anxiety. When your car breaks, you have to figure out what’s wrong, find a mechanic who can fix it, think about how to just a mechanic, figure out how much the unexpected cost will eat into your financial plans. You may plunge further into chaos: are drivers more dangerous now? Am I incompetent as a driver? When the simplified world breaks down, the complex world that was hidden away becomes obvious.

This happens with relationships too. In a stable romantic relationship, both people have their roles and identities, their history, their conception of the future. If one partner cheats on the other, all is shattered. How could this possibly have happened? Who is this person I’m living with? How could she have done this? What part of the happy past needs to be rewritten?

Precision of aim and careful attention protect us when things break down.

Rule 10: Define Your Problem Specifically - It Becomes Easier to Deal With

Give your problem specific form, and it becomes easier to deal with.

Exercise: Define Your Problem Specifically

(Shortform note: Depending on your viewpoint, this can be a controversial chapter as Peterson bemoans the “postmodernist” interpretation of gender as a social construct. He criticizes the assertion that biological differences between men and women do not exist.)

This chapter is meandering and confusing, but the main point is this: modern society desires gender equality. When gender equality means equal opportunity, rights, and treatment, this is good.

However, it can be taken too far - like denying _any_ biological difference between males and females, and insisting that behavior and outcomes be equal in _every_ way. This idea of literal, complete quality is not supported by biology, and it could be counterproductive because it forces people against their nature. For example, we might raise boys to “feminize” them, erasing their biological tendencies and making them less independent and more agreeable. This is counter to their nature and can cause unintended consequences.

### The Flaws of Complete Equality

Some postmodernist thinking claims that all of gender is entirely a social construct, that it was popularized by men to oppress women. This began with roots in communist ideals that all people should be equal, that the rich exploited the labor of the poor, and that social structures were put in place by the rich to oppress the poor. When implementing this idea largely failed in the Soviet Union and China, the Marxist ideals were rewritten, from the idea of oppression of the poor by the rich, to **oppression of _everyone_ by the powerful**.

When extended to its logical conclusion, this promoted skepticism that **every cultural construct and hierarchy was merely constructed by the powerful to continue their oppression** - science benefits only the scientists, gender classification benefits only the males, management benefits only the managers, measurement of skill benefit only the skilled. As the thinking goes, every hierarchy is an artificial construct made up to selfishly benefit the powerful and to exclude others. This means everything in the world is largely up to interpretation.

Peterson decries the nihilism in this approach, the rejection of all categorizations as done _only_ for power reasons. Surely power and corruption play some role in hierarchies, but they aren’t necessarily the only role or even the primary role. And believing this idea may be counter-productive, if it limits cooperation and contravenes biological roots evolved over millions of years.

The idea of complete equality itself is flawed. In general, **pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy - some people will be better and some will be worse**. In modern well-functioning societies, the hierarchy is based on competence and ability, not power. (Peterson argues the best predictors of long-term success in Western countries are IQ and conscientiousness.)

Take the most diehard egalitarian, and when she gets sick, see if she wants to find a more reputable, more skilled doctor. See then if she believes in a hierarchy of skill that is not merely an artificial construct.

To demand absolute equality between all people in all situations would require sacrificing value itself.

There is a perverse logic to the argument that all hierarchy is socially constructed. Its believers desire for _all inequalities_ to be eliminated, on the basis of fairness. But - IF some inequalities are hard-wired into our genes, or have functional purposes (like identifying the spectrum of skill), or result from free will (females may, given completely equal environmental treatment, just enjoy nursing more than males do), THEN proposing obliterating these would sound unreasonable. It would mean opposing free will, or overwriting biology.

In other words, **find someone who insists that _all_ hierarchies are artificial constructs, and you’ll see someone who cannot stomach the idea of inequality in any sense**.

### Accepting Inequality

Instead of bemoaning a narrow hierarchy, instead celebrate the complexity of culture that allows for a large number of games and successful players. Different people can have very different levels of success in different dimensions, and so one’s outcomes can’t be compared to anyone else's outcomes. Trying to compress everyone into completely equal outcomes - regardless of biology, behavior, and personal preferences - may be destructive.

Within gender, Peterson maintains **there are clear biological differences between men and women** - men tend to be more interested in things while women are more interested in people; men are more disobedient and women are more agreeable. The variation among individuals is very high - the most \[adjective\] of one gender is more \[adjective\] than the average person of the other gender (for instance, the most aggressive female is more aggressive than the average male), but by and large, the general trend is true.

And in societies with more social freedom (like Sweden) the gender imbalance in certain professions is magnified. For instance, the imbalance of males and females in engineering is greater than it is in the Middle East, where there is less social freedom. The implication is that when given freedom, people do what they naturally want to do.

When it gets down to it, even with equal opportunity, **what if women _really_ just want to nurse and teach more than men, and men _really_ want to design bridges more than women?** Should we force equality in ways that wouldn’t naturally arise, like forcing a 50-50 gender split in every single profession? What are the costs and benefits of this type of policy?

The idea that gender is a construct used to exert power has led to continuous (Peterson calls unfair) attacks on men. Men’s accomplishments are considered unearned due to their privilege by being born males; their ambitions make them plunderers. Men are attacked as oppressors, when there is little historical evidence that the patriarchy was deliberately designed by men to subjugate women and assert dominance.

Instead, Peterson considers another biological possibility - that women, by nature of sexual specialization, have to bear children; and that when they get pregnant, they need more protection than usual. In a time when humanity faced many more existential threats, with a higher probability of death and higher risk inherent in unwanted pregnancies, different legal treatments of men and women may have arisen.

*   This also explains why women tend to prefer mates who are at equal or higher social status levels, while males are more indifferent (this is true across cultures).
*   This leads to the depletion of possible mates for high-status women. Women who have to care for infants don’t want an adult male baby to look after as well.

### How to Treat Boys as They’re Growing

Peterson wants society to be amenable to the idea that **boys and men want to prove their competence, to friends and to romantic partners.** Boys want to skirt at the edge of danger, where life is challenging enough to grow. This is why friends tease each other and have hazing rituals, subjecting newcomers to social stress - they are evaluating character and determining who can be trusted, who has a strong spine, who is entertaining.

Peterson decries the neutering of male independence for the sake of gender equality. Instead of being independent, boys raised this way become socially weak and dependent on parents. Still, their natural urges remain, and they’ll lash out in other ways, like adhering to violent, fascist ideologies. “Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it.”

Modern parental overprotection robs men of this opportunity. Don’t remove risk from life - let children optimize for it and improve their competence. Let boys push against authority and toughen up and do some seemingly dangerous things. Hence his rule: “Leave children alone when they’re skateboarding.”

(Shortform note: while he discusses men and independence, Peterson doesn’t complete the argument to discuss how society should raise girls to suit female natural instincts.)

Rule 11: Accept that Inequality Exists

Suffering in life is guaranteed. This idea is present in every major religion, and it’s obvious from everyday life. Outcomes are unequal. People are born with different abilities. Some people get worse treatment than others. Peterson’s daughter suffered from unexplained juvenile rheumatoid arthritis for decades, enduring years of chronic pain and risking amputation. There is little more to question the sanity and justice of the world than having an ill child. What kind of god would allow this to happen?

One response to this, as stated above, is to hate your god or the universe for these outcomes. Stretched to its extreme, this becomes hatred of existence, and the desire to destroy existence itself. When practiced, this leads to genocide and mass murders. Clearly this is evil, causing suffering in the name of suffering, and not the right response.

Another response, which only partially mitigates the suffering, is to acknowledge that **limitation is critical to making existence meaningful.** When Superman was created as a comic book character, he had infinite powers and could overcome any situation. This became boring. There was nothing for him to struggle against, so he couldn’t be admirable; no lesson for him to learn, so he couldn’t grow. In response, the writers had to make him weak to kryptonite to make his stories interesting.

Peterson could have wished for her daughter to have an indestructible metal skeleton, or an inhumanly high threshold to pain. But then her daughter would be changed to a different person, even a monster. What can be loved about a person can’t be separated from their limitations.

There are also coping mechanisms for dealing with suffering. Promise yourself that you’ll only worry about a problem at a specific time of day (not at night, or else you can’t sleep) then promise not to think about the problem outside these scheduled times. This conserves your strength and allows you to deal with the rest of life, which doesn’t care what problems you’re facing.

**Finally, notice little bits of goodness that make existence tolerable, even justifiable.** See the girl splash happily into a puddle with her rain boots. Enjoy a particularly good coffee or book or conversation. Pet a cat when you run into one.

Rule 12: Take Time to Indulge in Little Bits of Goodness

Reflect on what you learned from 12 Rules for Life.

Exercise: What Should You Do Now?

12 Rules for Life

The 21st century will bring changes and challenges unlike any humans have encountered before. Globalism and technological innovations are changing the structures of societies worldwide—and the changes are happening quickly. **_21 Lessons for the 21st Century_ highlights the biggest challenges in the modern world, and it offers advice on making sense of and navigating such transitional times.** In five parts, the book:

1.  Takes stock of the current political and technological state
2.  Examines potential methods for societies to deal with modern challenges
3.  Discusses how humans can prevail over these challenges
4.  Questions how to make sense of the emerging world
5.  Explores how to find personal meaning in this world

This book is intended to inform people who feel too busy and overwhelmed with daily life to reflect on the state of the world and speculate on its future. If people don’t become better informed about the present and participate in shaping the future, society could have a class of obsolete workers whose jobs have been automated, people could lose the ability to make their own decisions, and nuclear weapons could annihilate much of the world.

In our globally connected world, one person’s small actions can impact an entire community on the other side of the world—for example, choosing to buy a particular shirt could be supporting child labor in Uzbekistan. **This book will discuss individual and societal behaviors that shape cultures and impact the fate of the planet.** Each of the 21 chapters covers a lesson about the challenges humans face and how to address them. There are no easy answers—rather, this book is meant to spur readers to keep exploring and to participate in shaping the future.

(Shortform note: Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian, philosopher, and lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harari’s previous books include:

*   _Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind_, which explains how humans evolved to become the dominant species in the world. [Read our summary of Sapiens to learn more.](https://www.shortform.com/app/book/sapiens)
*   _Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow_, which explores how humans will use their power and technology to shape the future

Whereas these books focus on the past and the future, _21 Lessons_ discusses the present moment and the remaining decades of this century.)

**Lesson:** Liberalism—which values personal freedoms, free trade, and free elections—is the dominant political model today, but technological changes are transforming the political, social, and economic structures on which liberalism stands.

**Political models have always served the purpose of providing a story to make sense of the world and an ideal future to work toward.** That story depends on the political, economic, and social context at the time. As a result, there have been several times throughout human history when the political model of the day became irrelevant and needed to be replaced.

Feudalism and monarchism were the reigning political models until the Industrial Revolution created such upheaval in economics and politics that those models no longer fit. In response, in the 1900s, elites around the world developed three new political stories, each of which offered a different way of making sense of the world and shaping the future:

1.  **The fascist story:** There have been tensions and struggles _among nations_ throughout history. In an ideal future, one nation flexes its power over all others, but violence is likely.
2.  **The communist story:** There have been tensions and struggles _among economic classes_ throughout history. In an ideal future, a universal social system provides for everyone equally, but people wouldn’t have liberty.
3.  **The liberal story:** There have been tensions and struggles _between freedom and tyranny_ throughout history. In an ideal world, everyone works together with little government intervention, but inequality is inevitable.

World War II struck down the fascist story. By the end of the 1980s, the communist story also unraveled. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, liberalism was the primary story that people used to understand the world around them. **Liberalism promoted individual freedoms as the keys to resolving all major societal issues, including poverty, oppression, and violence—**through free trade, low taxes, free elections, peaceful international relations, rights for minority groups, and pro-immigration policies. In the U.S., although Democrats are associated with liberalism and Republicans with conservatism, politicians on both sides of the aisle held liberal views, merely in different forms.

However, after the 2008 global financial crisis, people became disillusioned with the liberal view of the world. Liberal desires to protect the free global flow of products, people, and ideas fell out of favor, and nations began pushing back against immigration and trade agreements (we’ll explore this more as we discuss the rise of nationalism in Chapter 7). **With the fall of liberalism, people around the world find themselves with no political story to interpret current events and plan for future challenges**, such as climate change and technological advancements. Technological disruptions and a changing economic system have also played parts in making liberalism obsolete.

### The Dual Rise of Infotech and Biotech

Liberalism was developed to fit the social, political, and economic context of the Industrial Era, but **the massive technological innovations that have arisen since the 1990s have made the liberal story irrelevant.** For example, the Industrial Revolution created an economy that was dependent upon a mass of unskilled workers. By contrast, now, it’s likely that artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually eliminate many jobs, and cryptocurrencies are dramatically changing the financial system.

Specifically, parallel revolutions in infotech and biotech are transforming societies and economies as well as individuals’ minds and bodies. First, in contrast to the relatively straightforward innovations of the Industrial Era, technological advancements are becoming too complex for most people to understand. As a result, people are uninformed about how machines are changing the labor market and algorithms are influencing the way they think, shop, and vote. **Many people feel disconnected and left behind by new technologies, and they worry about becoming irrelevant in a changing labor market.**

However, it’s critical to the future of the globe that people understand and participate in the changes happening around them. Even politicians are struggling to grasp the effects of these tech revolutions, despite the fact that they pass laws governing their effects, such as how to manage the collection and use of Big Data.

Second, the biotech and infotech revolutions are allowing humans to alter their own bodies, which could have unknown consequences. Before these revolutions began, humans developed technology to alter the _external_ world—for example, by building a dam to change a river’s course. Because people did not consider the long-term effects, the world is now facing climate change as a result of humans’ massive changes to the planet. Now, technology is being developed to alter humans’ _internal_ worlds, such as slowing or stopping the aging process through bioengineering. **If people again fail to consider the long-term consequences, these internal changes could have major effects on individuals’ psychological well-being and the way society functions collectively.**

### Abandoning Liberalism and Creating a New Story

**Most of the people who are disillusioned with liberalism today don’t disagree with all liberal ideals—rather, they want to do away with the _global_ aspects of liberalism, and keep only the _national_ ones**:

*   From an economic standpoint, people may still support free markets and low taxes, but not free trade and low tariffs.
*   From a political standpoint, people may still support free elections and minority rights, but not multilateral cooperation and international laws.
*   From a personal standpoint, people may support diversity and gender equality, but not immigration.

However, the national and global values of liberalism are interconnected. For example, you can’t promote consumer rights to the free market without also supporting international trade. Increasing support for national over global policies led to the election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit in 2016. Both political movements tapped into a desire to return to an imagined past golden era (as evidenced by the “Make America Great Again” slogan)—but this approach is unlikely to prepare the world for the completely new territory ahead.

At present, liberalism is better than the alternative political stories that currently exist (such as authoritarianism), but it still doesn’t offer answers for our most pressing modern challenges: climate change and technological disruptions. **When people reach the other side of this phase of disillusionment with liberalism, they must either adapt an old political model to modern times or create a new one in order to have a roadmap for navigating present and future challenges.**

Part 1: Technology | Chapter 1: Liberalism Is Becoming Irrelevant

**Lesson:** Technological innovation is enabling AI to perform an increasing number of jobs, which will cause massive unemployment.

One of the biggest challenges of the 21st century will be a fundamental change in the labor market caused by technological disruption. In other words, **increasingly sophisticated technology could automate so many jobs that unemployment skyrockets.**

Throughout history, each new machine and labor-saving technology created at least as many jobs as it eliminated—for example, a piece of equipment that replaced a human laborer also required someone to operate the equipment and another person to do maintenance on it. Past innovations substituted human workers’ _physical_ capabilities, but not their _cognitive_ abilities. No matter how quickly a machine could sew a shirt compared to a seamstress, the machine couldn’t take customers’ measurements.

However, **the dual rise of infotech and biotech is creating technologies that could truly replace the need for human workers.** New discoveries in neuroscience have revealed that human skills such as analyzing, decision-making, communicating, and interpreting other people’s emotions are the results of specific brain algorithms—not the elusive forces of free will. For example, when a lawyer enters negotiations, she’s not being guided by her intuition, but rather by algorithms that pick up on the other party’s biochemical patterns, including their gestures, tones of voice, and facial expressions.

Now that scientists understand how the human brain uses these algorithms, technologists can replicate those processes with AI. As a result, **not only can machines do a human’s job, but they can do it better than humans, because they’re immune to human error and biases.** Additionally, machines can be connected on a network and updated all at once. Imagine the implications in the medical field: When new research comes out, it’s nearly impossible to alert every doctor in the world—but a global network of AI doctors could receive that update in an instant. Similarly, a network of self-driving taxis could all be updated whenever traffic laws are updated.

**The indirect effects of automating high-skilled jobs would be substantial and far-reaching.** For example, if computers can do the job of doctors, the massive savings in payroll could make healthcare more affordable for everyone. Furthermore, patients in rural Uganda could receive the same quality of care as patients on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, because their robot doctors would have access to the same information and resources.

However, even with the improved capabilities of AI, not all professions lend themselves to automation. For example, AI doctors are more likely than AI nurses because doctors’ job duties involve collecting data on patients’ symptoms and analyzing the information in order to give diagnoses—and data collection and analysis are two of computers’ strongest abilities. On the other hand, nurses need a broader range of physical and emotional skills to work with patients.

### Automating Creativity

While it’s tempting to assume that creative professionals like artists and musicians would be similar to nurses in being immune to automation, even the arts aren’t safe from AI. Just as decision-making and interpersonal interactions trace back to neurological processes, so do emotions, which are at the core of creating and consuming art. When you listen to music, your emotional response is reflected in physical reactions, such as a change in heart rate and hormone levels. **Machines measuring your biometric data could learn your preferences and create art designed to elicit a specific emotional response.**

For example, if you go through a breakup, an AI sound system that has learned which genres, bands, and songs you like could detect your emotions and play the perfect sad and angry songs to fit your mood. If you prefer that your sound system plays music that lifts your mood, you could make one of two adjustments:

1.  Program your sound system to play happier music.
2.  Program the system to choose songs based on your preferred psychological philosophy—for example, you could program it to follow the teachings of psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her five stages of grief, playing songs that reflect and elicit denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Additionally, your AI sound system could:

*   Introduce you to new music, if you simply program it to play random songs 5 percent of the time
*   Keep track of your favorite and least favorite songs based on your biometric readings
*   Detect when a song you love has a verse or a note that annoys you, and slightly edit the song to eliminate the annoyance
*   Compose music specifically tailored to your preferences and emotional response
*   Use data from a global biometric database to compose a song that resonates with everyone and becomes a worldwide hit

Since the arts are generally revered as uniquely human endeavors, the potential for AI to automate creativity will force humans to confront the question: **Is art about playing on human emotions—which reflect biochemical activity—or is it something deeper?**

### Automation Creating a “Useless Class”

Although AI has the potential to eliminate many jobs, it can also create or shift work in three ways:

1.  **Integrating the technology will create jobs related to its use.** For example, if human pilots are replaced by drones, the change will create a need for people to maintain the drones, pilot them, and ensure that they aren’t hacked.
2.  **The money saved in payroll can go toward funding research and innovation.** For example, in the medical field, if AI doctors begin diagnosing patients, human doctors and lab assistants can research diseases and develop new treatments.
3.  In some fields, **human workers can team up with computers** to perform better than either could do individually.

**Despite these possibilities, it’s likely that there will still be a net loss in employment, creating a “useless class” of unskilled workers.** Some workers will be able to get training in a new set of skills, but technology will continue to change so rapidly that those new skills could also become obsolete a decade later. Even in fields that introduce human-computer teams, the computers may eventually perform so well that they no longer need their human partners. This volatility in the job market presents its own challenges, such as:

*   Making it difficult to unionize and establish labor rights
*   Causing stress for workers who face a never-ending cycle of training for jobs that soon become automated

Faced with the possibility of looming unemployment, there are a few possible routes that the government can take:

1.  **Step in and slow the adoption of technology and automation.** Just because a technology exists doesn’t mean that it has to be used—even if it could increase efficiency and profits.
2.  **Create new jobs.** However, this approach requires the government to subsidize workers’ extended education and training, and to create a safety net for workers’ transitional periods between jobs.
3.  **Develop systems to cope with inevitable unemployment** in a post-work society.

#### Accommodating for a Post-Work Society

**If the world faces the possibility of a post-work economy, governments need to determine ways to support people.** One possibility is a universal basic income (UBI), which taxes corporations and billionaires and distributes money to the rest of the population. However, this strategy has a few major complications:

1.  UBI is generally collected and distributed on a national basis, but **in a modern global market, the people who most need to be subsidized may be on the other side of the world.** Many developing countries without profitable natural resources outsource cheap labor, such as factory workers and call center operators. When AI automates these jobs, those wages will go to the Silicon Valley tech companies and the workers abroad will be left with nothing. But it’s hard to imagine Americans voting to approve taxes that subsidize not only _American_ victims of automation, but also _foreign_ ones.
2.  There’s no objective measure for which needs are considered basic. It would be difficult to determine if basic income should cover just enough for people to buy food and survive, or whether it also includes education (and to what level) and healthcare (and how extensive).

**Another possibility is to broaden the definition of work.** Parents who take care of their children, people who take care of elderly relatives, and community members who organize their neighbors are all contributing to society but don’t get paid for these services. If the government recognized these tasks as jobs and paid the people who performed them, it would reduce unemployment—but the government would need to levy taxes in order to fund those wages. In practice, this ends up being similar to UBI.

**A third possibility is to provide free basic _services_ instead of basic _income_.** This would require the government to cover the cost of education, transportation, healthcare, and other services. This is the ideal in communism. However, this strategy would still require governments to determine what “basic” encompasses.

---

Twentieth-century workers were vital to the economy but lacked political power, so they fought against exploitation. **In this technological revolution, workers may have political power but they are not necessary to the labor market, so they face a fight against irrelevance.** There are so many variables—from how technology will develop to how the government and society will adopt new innovations—that there’s no way to know how the labor market will change or how long it will take. However, the stakes are high enough that people can’t afford to bury their heads in the sand about the possibility.

Chapter 2: Technology Will Create a Useless Class

Could widespread automation threaten your job?

Exercise: Could You Become a Member of the Useless Class?

**Lesson:** As algorithms provide increasingly accurate suggestions, their convenience is almost irresistible—but relying on algorithms to make your decisions causes you to lose the freedom and ability to make your own choices.

In addition to threatening jobs, technology threatens human liberty, as algorithms learn so much about people that they gain an immense power to influence and manipulate. This is another way that technology is undermining liberalism, which is all about freedom and personal liberties—to vote, to buy goods in a free market, and to pursue individual dreams and goals with the protection of human rights.

Liberalism maintains that everyone has free will, regardless of education and social status. In practice, people’s choices of free will reflect their feelings more often than their knowledge. For example, between two presidential candidates, voters are more likely to choose the one who gives them a good feeling, even if the other candidate has a more thorough policy plan. Similarly, elected officials often make decisions based on gut feelings and intuition, even when they go against advisors’ recommendations. From the way voters vote to the way leaders lead, **democracy hinges on emotion-driven free will—but technological advancements could make it possible to hack people’s emotions, leading to disastrous results.**

### Shifting From Free Will to Technology

Before the advent of liberalism, societies were guided by mystical, divine messages from the gods. In the last few centuries, the authority shifted from gods to free will. **Although free will feels free, it’s actually a biochemical response honed by evolution and designed to help you survive and thrive.** For example, when you see a snake, your reaction to run away is merely an evolutionary response to keep you safe. Similarly, when you feel bad after having an argument with a friend, your desire to make amends is not purely emotional, but rather a function of your biological wiring to cooperate within a community.

This biochemical process meant to promote your safety and well-being—which we call free will— has historically been a perfectly valid method of making decisions and running democracies. However, science has developed technology that can not only _replicate_ that process but also perform it _better_ than you can. **As people shift authority from free will to computer algorithms, liberalism becomes increasingly obsolete.**

People have already delegated some tasks to algorithms: You let Netflix suggest your next movie, and Google maps tells you when and where to turn. Each decision that algorithms make for you has two effects:

1.  **Your trust in the algorithm increases.** When Netflix suggests a movie, and you end up loving it, that experience reinforces your reliance on Netflix’s recommendation. Similarly, if Google maps tells you to turn left, but you turn right and get stuck in traffic, next time you’ll follow Google’s direction—and when you do, and you arrive at your destination without traffic, you’ll not only _gain_ trust in Google maps, but you’ll _lose_ trust in your own abilities.
2.  **The algorithm learns more about your preferences**, which enables it to make even better decisions for you in the future. As the algorithm gains more knowledge about you, it will make better choices for you, which will reinforce your increasing trust in its decision-making and decreasing trust in your own.

The algorithms won’t be perfect, and they won’t make the best decision every time—but they don’t have to. **As long as algorithms make better choices on average than humans do, they’ll still be considered a better alternative.** Additionally, if people wear biometric sensors on or inside their bodies, those sensors can monitor heart rate, blood pressure, and other indicators of your preferences, opinions, and emotions. Using this data, the computer can make even more well-informed decisions for you.

**The reliance on algorithms can easily snowball to more and bigger decisions, such as where to go to college, which career to pursue, and who to marry.** An algorithm that uses your biometric data can learn what makes you laugh, what makes you cringe, and what makes you cry. This algorithm could use that data to find a compatible partner for you to marry, and it would probably make a better choice than you would with your free will, since your decision might be influenced by a past breakup or be otherwise biased in some way.

If computers make all of your big decisions, your life would probably be much smoother without dealing with the stress of decision-making or the consequences of poor choices. But what would that life be like? So much of the drama and action in day-to-day life revolves around decision-making—from deciding whether to take on a project at work to figuring out where to relocate your family. The value humans place on decision-making is reflected in various institutions. For example:

*   Liberalism is all about the individual’s choice to vote as she wants and buy what she wants.
*   Religions emphasize making the right choices and resisting the wrong ones.
*   The arts reflect the prominence of decisions in human lives, as in Hamlet’s famous dilemma, “to be or not to be.”

When humans rely on algorithms to make every choice for them—essentially molding the path of their lives—what will humans’ role be, besides providing biometric data to be used in the decision-making process and then carrying out the verdict?

### Empowering Computers to Make Ethical Decisions

Some of the most difficult and nuanced decisions people have to make are about ethical dilemmas. If they’re programmed to do so, algorithms could even handle ethical decisions—but the capability would come with pros and cons.

**On the positive side, algorithms would make the ethical choice every time.** The computer wouldn’t be swayed by selfish motives, emotions, or subconscious biases, as humans are. Regardless of how resolute a person may be about ethics, in a stressful or chaotic situation, emotion and primitive instincts kick in and can override philosophical ethics. Additionally, a hiring manager can insist that racial and gender discrimination are wrong—but her subconscious biases may still prevent her from hiring a black female job applicant.

On the negative side, delegating decisions to machines that follow absolute ethics raises the question: **Who decides which philosophy is programmed into the software?** Imagine a self-driving car cruising down a road when children run into the street in front of it. In a split second, the car’s algorithm determines that there are two choices:

1.  Run into the children. The computer would opt for this choice if it’s programmed to follow an egoistic philosophy, which saves the car owner at all expenses.
2.  Swerve into oncoming traffic, which would almost certainly kill the owner of the car, who’s in the passenger seat. The computer would opt for this choice if it’s programmed to follow an altruistic philosophy, which saves others at the expense of the car owner.

Alternatively, the self-driving car manufacturer could offer two models of the car, each of which follows a different philosophy. If consumers have to choose which model to buy, how many will choose the car that sacrifices them? **Although many people might agree that the car should spare the children in a hypothetical situation, few would actually volunteer to sacrifice themselves in order to follow ethics** (this brings us back to the point above, that humans often don’t follow ethics in real-life situations).

Another possibility is that the government mandates how the cars are programmed. On one hand, this gives the government the power to pass laws that are guaranteed to be followed to a tee, since the computers won’t deviate from their programming. On the other hand, this practically amounts to totalitarian power, because lawmakers are determining the actions of computers that are entrusted with making decisions for people.

#### Creating New Forms of Discrimination

The potential dangers of AI are scary, but some of them are already a reality. Corporations, banks, and other institutions already use algorithms to make decisions, such as which loan applicants to approve or deny. On the positive side, an algorithm can’t racially discriminate against an applicant (unless it’s programmed to do so). On the negative side, the algorithm may discriminate against you based on individual characteristics—it could be something in your DNA, or your social media account. With algorithms in charge, you’re more likely to face discrimination based on _who you are_, rather than _to which group you belong_.

This shift brings two consequences:

1.  **It will be difficult to recognize—and remedy—this form of discrimination.** If a loan applicant asks why she was denied, the banker won’t know. The people using the algorithm are unlikely to understand the computer’s process or know its reasoning, they’ll simply trust that it’s right.
2.  **It will be difficult to fight this form of discrimination.** If you face prejudice based on your race, gender, ability, or some other common characteristic, you can organize a protest with other people who share that characteristic. However, if you face prejudice based on your individual characteristics, there is no collective group experiencing this discrimination, so you’ll be fighting it alone.

### Strengthening Dictators With AI

The example of self-driving cars highlights one of the dangers of AI: The computer does whatever it’s programmed to do, no matter what. In some cases, that characteristic makes computers less dangerous than humans, because the computers won’t succumb to anger or retaliation and break the rules. However, the opposite side of the coin is that computers won’t be influenced by compassion or extenuating circumstances. In other words, **robots are as benign or as dangerous as the people who program them**—and, in the hands of corrupt, violent, or power-hungry people, robots could bring devastation to humans.

In the 21st century, AI could become widespread in countries run by dictators. Consider the possibilities if this technology is used in:

1.  **Warfare**: If human soldiers are replaced by robots that are programmed to kill the enemy indiscriminately, they would spare no civilian or child in the opposing nation. The robots could fight tirelessly and endlessly, without being slowed down by hunger, fatigue, mental exhaustion, and psychological trauma. And robot soldiers would never defect or protest against an unjust war.
2.  **Weapons**: If weaponry is automated, there would be nothing to stop or slow the carnage that the machines were programmed to inflict.
3.  **Surveillance**: If government leaders expanded surveillance to include biometric data, they could essentially achieve mind control over their citizens. Technology already collects data on the behavior of citizens in many countries, but new technological developments could expand this exponentially. A government could not only place cameras and microphones in public and private settings, but it could also mandate that its citizens wear biometric sensors that report data about each person’s thoughts and feelings. With this power, the government could know what every citizen is doing and thinking at all times. Additionally, it could also use that biometric information to manipulate how people think and feel in order to gain total control over the population.

In the last century, democratic countries were more prosperous than dictatorships because they assigned many people to help process information for decision-making. With such a large volume of information—for example, to make a decision on whether to impose a new tariff—a larger number of people were able to process it and reach a decision more quickly, enabling the country to act promptly and, thus, prosper. Dictatorships, on the other hand, concentrated information and responsibility among a small group, which slowed the processing and decision-making.

By contrast, **in the 21st century, AI could give dictatorships a competitive advantage.** First, algorithms can process information much more rapidly than humans, which would close the gap that currently gives democracies an advantage over dictatorships. Second, the more information an algorithm processes, the more it learns and the more accurate it becomes—and dictators are likely to collect more information than democracies. For example, a democratic country keeps citizens’ medical records private, while an authoritarian government may collect not only medical records but also DNA scans. That kind of massive database of information would let a dictator know practically everything about her citizens, enabling her to wield immense control over them.

### Preventing AI Mind Control

Although AI could develop to the point that programmers could wire it with consciousness—which would essentially give computers a mind of their own, as science fiction thrillers forewarn—the possibility is remote. The larger danger is that humans put so much effort into developing AI that they neglect to develop their own consciousness and ability to discern. **If people come to rely on computers for everything—and distrust their own instincts and capabilities in the process—then they become easy victims for manipulation.** In fact, this threat has begun to come true in elections all over the world, as social media bots exploit voters’ fears and prejudices in order to influence their political actions.

In order to avoid falling victim to total mind control by AI, humans must devote more time and energy to researching and developing human consciousness. Furthermore, this commitment must be prioritized above immediate economic and political benefits. For example, many people managers expect their employees to respond promptly to emails, even after hours. That expectation causes employees to compulsively check and answer emails, even at the expense of their experiences and sensations—during dinner, they may be so consumed in their email that they don’t even notice the taste and texture of their food. **If humans follow this road, they will become cogs in a machine run by robots, and they’ll lose the ability to live up to their potential as individuals.**

Chapter 3: Algorithms Threaten Human Liberty

You already use algorithms every day. Does the convenience outweigh any concerns?

Exercise: How Present Are Algorithms In Your Daily Life?

**Lesson:** In addition to creating a useless class, technology gives wealthy elites access to health and economic advantages that exacerbate inequality, creating a vicious cycle.

As technology threatens to create a useless class of unskilled workers and algorithms have the potential to overpower free will, inequality could grow exponentially: **On one end of the spectrum will be the people who become unemployed when computers automate their jobs, and on the other end will be the wealthy CEOs who own the tech companies that automated those jobs.**

Inequality has always existed to varying degrees in human societies:

*   During the Stone Age, some people were buried with jewels and other goods, while others were dumped into simple graves.
*   After the Agricultural Revolution, inequality worsened as people possessed more property—in the form of animals, land, and tools—with which to distinguish between the haves and the have-nots.
*   **During the Industrial Revolution, a company’s and country’s success depended more than ever on masses of common workers, so equality became more important to societies and governments throughout the 20th century.** Governments started providing more healthcare, education, and other resources to keep people healthy and working.

The rise of technology and globalization brought speculation that equality would increase among people all over the world, but the opposite is happening: A small class of the tech elite possesses a huge portion of the world’s wealth, while billions struggle in poverty. If (or when) AI creates a useless class, the gap will widen further. Additionally, when the masses are no longer critical or even relevant to the economy, the wealthy elite may be less inclined to provide healthcare, education, and other services.

Making matters worse, developments in biotech could enable wealthy elites to become biologically superior by improving their physical and cognitive abilities and extending their lives. Throughout history, socially and economically elite classes owed their status to good fortune, cultural privileges, and hard work. But **if wealthy elites gain biological advantages over the poor—and the poor are pushed out of opportunities to work and gain wealth—it could create a vicious cycle that continually widens the gap between haves and have-nots.** Taken to the extreme, bioengineering could eventually turn the rich into a separate species with no need for the underclass of commoners.

### Protecting Your Data

In order to prevent the rise of a biologically superior species of wealthy tech elites, **governments need to regulate who owns data, which is the most valuable asset of the 21st century.** In the past, power belonged to those who owned the most land. Then, machines, factories, and corporations became the most valuable forms of capital. In the digital age, data is king.

Tech companies already profit from collecting and selling consumers’ data. The more that corporations learn about the behaviors and preferences of masses of internet users, the more they’ll be able to control those consumers. Soon enough, advertisements could become obsolete—already, when Netflix recommends a movie based on your specific behaviors, you have less need for the movie trailer. As Netflix, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies learn more about you and deliver recommendations tailored specifically to your preferences, why would you need a commercial?

Convenient as it may be to let Google assist your purchasing choices, the consequences of massive data collection could quickly snowball. Currently, people essentially connect to a data gathering network when they use the internet on their computers and smartphones. In time, people could become increasingly connected to a data collection network, in which devices collect biometric information 24 hours a day, starting in infancy. The data could be used to determine your insurance policies, healthcare, or your employment—and if you choose to disconnect, you could risk losing your insurance, healthcare, and job.

The critical question will be: Who owns your data?

*   **If corporations own your data, there’s huge potential that they could use it to manipulate you** and influence you to buy their products and services.
*   **If the government owns your data, politicians will have the power to exploit and influence your thoughts and emotions**, which could essentially amount to national mind control.
*   **If you own your own data, how do you protect it?** When land was the most valuable asset, people could simply build fences around their properties. When industry became more valuable, people developed a system of ownership through buying and selling shares of a company. Protecting ownership of your data is a complex problem that will likely take years and many attempts to solve.

Chapter 4: Technology Is Worsening Inequality

**Lesson:** People’s social lives exist largely online, but people need communities and face-to-face interaction to thrive. In addition to maintaining close-knit communities, people must recognize and participate in the global civilization that exists today.

How will humans tackle the massive challenges they face in the 21st century? One option is to band together and tackle them as communities.

Besides food, water, and shelter, belonging to a community is essential for humans to survive and thrive. Throughout most of human history, people lived in small tribes, typically consisting of a few hundred people. In a community of this size, you can have some form of relationship with everyone, which optimizes group dynamics. However, in recent centuries, small tribes have been replaced with large nations—and **some people believe that the loss of community has been a major factor in creating the challenges that modern societies face**, from corrupt governments to drug addiction crises.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes so strongly in the restorative power of communities that he has made a mission of connecting Facebook users via virtual groups. Zuckerberg’s project uses AI to suggest groups that might be meaningful to individual Facebook users. **The goal is to use the social media platform and the algorithmic tools to rebuild communities where people now gather—online—in order to improve connections among people throughout the world.**

Zuckerberg is not the first to try to build communities in order to improve society. Activist groups, religious groups, and others build communities around their shared goals and values. However, the Facebook project is unique in a few ways, including:

1.  Its global reach
2.  Its reliance on technology
3.  Its corporate funding

### Communities Must Exist Offline

Zuckerberg’s goal to connect people will only work if he can bridge the divide between the online world and the offline one. Facebook users can join meaningful communities online and connect with members of those communities through posts and messages—but will their community still exist if the website crashes? **In order to truly bring humanity closer together, the communities that begin online need to make the jump to the real world.**

Creating a true connection with someone requires you to interact with her as a whole person, which generally calls for face-to-face interaction. When you get to know someone only through her posts and curated photos, you have a limited understanding of her. By contrast, if you meet someone for a cup of coffee, your conversation could wander to topics that aren’t on her Facebook page, like your shared love of baseball. After that conversation, you’re more likely to be open-minded when she expresses a political view you oppose than you would be if you didn’t have a well-rounded understanding of her. In other words, without a physical, real-world relationship, you’re more likely to be polarized and repelled by opposing opinions.

**If Facebook truly wants to rebuild human communities**—in the real world, not just online—**then it may have to adopt strategies that actually encourage users to spend _less_ time online and _more_ time in the real world.** Such a policy would inevitably hurt the company’s finances, and shareholders would not be happy with the drop in profits, no matter how noble the cause. This is the reason that corporations historically have not led social revolutions, because company leaders, employees, and shareholders won’t tolerate the sacrifices that the revolution requires.

Aside from keeping people physically distanced from each other, **technology also creates a disconnect between you and your own body, sensations, and emotions.** When you use a device, only your eyes, ears, and fingers are engaged. If you’re looking at your email while eating lunch, you’re probably not paying attention to the taste, smell, or texture of your food. Furthermore, online interaction has trained people to externalize their experiences: If you are on a scenic hike, your own enjoyment is easily diluted by the impulse to snap a photo, post it on social media, and wait for likes and comments to affirm that you’re having a lovely experience.

In order for Facebook and other tech giants to succeed in bringing people together, they, too, must see internet users as more than just ears, eyes, and fingers. In order to connect people to one another, Zuckerberg has to first appreciate who people are as whole beings. However, if tech companies understand that they’re not connecting with their users’ full selves, then they’ll see the limitations of their reach, and they might be tempted to use algorithms to extend that reach in potentially intrusive ways. Google Glass and Pokemon Go were two attempts to blur the lines between online and offline realities. On a more extreme level, tech giants could use biometric sensors and interfaces that directly connect users' brains to the computer in order to truly bridge people’s physical realities with their virtual worlds—and that could lead to major manipulation.

### Everyone Belongs to a Global Civilization

The goal of bringing humanity together raises the question: What divided humanity in the first place? Throughout history, people have distinguished different cultures and religions as distinct civilizations that clash and compete, as if natural selection were weeding out various sects of humanity. For example, politicians and pundits today talk about the clash between Islamic civilization and Western civilization, claiming that only one or the other can ultimately survive.

In reality, **all humans are part of a global civilization, and individual cultural identities and social structures are merely different branches of that civilization.** Although a Muslim and a Westerner may behave differently, the differences are cultural, not genetic. People tend to reinforce differences among different cultures by overemphasizing the defining characteristics of each culture, pointing to common themes throughout that culture’s history. However, the most consistent and enduring characteristic of any culture is its ever-changing nature. For example, modern ultra-Orthodox Jews go to great lengths to separate men and women in synagogues in the name of traditions around modesty—and this becomes a point of distinction between them and other cultures—but excavations of ancient synagogues in Israel reveal murals of scantily clad women, suggesting that modesty is not an ancient value in that culture.

#### Nations Merge Into a Global Civilization

Unlike different species—which can never merge—civilizations can come together as one. Throughout human history, distinct tribes have merged into larger nations and civilizations. **In recent generations, as globalization has connected the world economically, socially, and technologically, all of humankind has merged into one global civilization.**

There are two aspects of this process of global merging:

1) **Creating connections that link groups.** This can happen between groups that appear to have little in common. For example, during the 20th century, wars played a large role in linking countries around the world. Although war limits or halts trade between battling nations, the deployment of troops quickly spreads cultural practices, ideas, and technologies. War also creates connections by raising the public’s curiosity about the enemy—for example, far more American movies have been made about Russia, Vietnam, and the Middle East than Canada.

2) **Establishing uniform behaviors among groups.** On the surface, it may not seem like there is uniformity in our global civilization. But, at its core, virtually every modern culture follows the same political paradigm, which values human rights, political representation, and international law. On a more visible level, nearly every country has a rectangular flag comprising simple shapes and colors, as well as an anthem that lasts a few minutes and hits on themes of patriotism and independence. These shared values make it possible for people across the globe to find common ground, and that has been critical to the merging of the modern global civilization.

By contrast, a thousand years ago, people in different regions followed different political models—some were loyal to kings, others followed priests, some were tribal, and others believed themselves to be the only legitimate civilization. Additionally, power and political structures changed constantly, as some societies disintegrated and others conquered and absorbed new territories. As a result, it was nearly impossible for different groups to agree on procedures and laws for their interactions amongst each other.

#### Institutions and Conflicts Define a Civilization

The commonalities we see among nations in the modern world are not limited to political paradigms. They also include:

*   **Economic systems:** A thousand years ago, different groups had distinct economic models governing money, taxes, income, and trade. Today, although countries have different currencies, they generally all follow some version of capitalism. Additionally, in the modern globalized economy, nations around the world are interconnected through the global supply chain.
*   **Medical practices:** A thousand years ago, if you became sick, your treatment would depend largely upon which group you belonged to. In one region, a priest would tell you to pray and donate to the church in order to get well. In another region, doctors would prescribe herbs and tonics. Today, despite some cultural nuances and differences in available resources, you would get the same treatment almost anywhere in the world. Just about all doctors learn the same scientific foundation, follow the same protocols, and prescribe the same drugs.
*   **Science:** A thousand years ago, different groups and cultures had distinct explanations for how and why the world worked the way it did. Today, scientists in all corners of the world agree that the earth is round and that gravity pulls objects down.

Of course, there are differences among groups—from religious beliefs to national identities—but all of the basic and practical matters are largely agreed upon. Furthermore, no civilization is without internal disputes; even within a family or a friend group, disagreements are inevitable. In fact, **common conflicts and dilemmas are a defining feature of membership within a group.** For example, in 1618, members of the European civilization were in fierce conflict about their vastly different religious views. At the time, that struggle _defined_ European identity, because those outside of that civilization would have little understanding or interest in such a dilemma.

Today, in our global civilization, the biggest challenges of the 21st century will confront people in all corners of the world, including:

*   The effects of climate change
*   The advancement of technology and automation in the labor market
*   Innovations in biotechnology to improve and extend life

Part 2: Politics | Chapters 5-6: Join Others to Tackle Modern Problems

Reflect on the communities to which you belong, where they exist, and how they impact you.

Exercise: What Role Do Communities Play in Your Life?

**Lesson:** Many people around the world are finding comfort in the identity and community of their nations and faith—but nationalism and religion create an “us” and “them” mentality, which makes it difficult to come together as a global civilization to address collective problems.

Despite the undeniable existence of a global civilization, many countries are increasingly leaning into nationalism. People have returned to nationalism in recent years in response to modern challenges, but nationalism has deep roots in human society.

For millions of years, humans lived in smaller communities and tribes, but, over time, they merged to take on challenges that were too big for one group to handle. For example, ancient tribes near the Nile River relied on the water to grow their crops, but they constantly had to deal with years of drought and years of flooding. Each tribe had limited manpower and claimed a small section of the river, so, eventually, many tribes banded together to build dams and canals that benefited everyone.

Over time, nation-states formed, and people used culture as a tool to achieve cooperation among a mass of people. The nationalism that resulted has two distinct ingredients:

1.  **A preference for _us_ over _them_**, meaning that people identify with fellow members of their nations and not with foreigners. This comes easily to humans.
2.  **A sense of duty toward strangers within their nation over friends and family.** For example, a U.S. citizen pays taxes that help to fund public schools for millions of children, even though it takes away money to send her own children to private school. It is not natural for humans to benefit strangers over people they know and care about, so national governments promote patriotism and provide incentives in the form of healthcare, security, and welfare systems.

### Nationalism’s Shortcomings

Mild nationalism enables you to value your country as _unique_ and valuable, and it motivates you to contribute to the well-being of all of your fellow citizens. On the other hand, extreme nationalism leads you to think your country is _superior_ to all other nations, and it easily snowballs to war and violence toward foreigners.

To a point, people tolerate the negatives of nationalism, such as war, because of the benefits of nationalism, such as an education system. However, in the 1960s, the threat of nuclear annihilation caused Americans to step back from the nationalism that drove the country into wars; by the end of the Cold War, many people leaned heavily toward globalization. But, **in recent years, feelings of disconnection from global economic forces and fears that globalization would disintegrate national systems of education and healthcare have revived a sense of nationalism.**

Proponents of nationalism see immigration, multiculturalism, and globalization as threats to national traditions and identities. They’re in favor of closing borders and slowing the exchange of people, products, money, and knowledge. Instead, nationalists envision a world in which independent nations peacefully trade and coexist without sharing common values, cultures, or laws.

The problem with the nationalist view is that it doesn’t offer any realistic strategy for keeping peace in the world. Each nation will naturally have its own interests (such as expanding its borders to annex desirable land), and some of those interests will inevitably conflict with other nations’ goals. **Without shared values, political principles, and international laws, there are no peaceful means of solving these disputes among countries, and they almost certainly lead to war and genocide.**

A nationalist in a powerful nation—such as Russia or the U.S.—may assume that her country is strong enough to stand on its own, regardless of whether the rest of the world falls into chaos. However, this view underestimates the need for international trade and global laws governing that trade. Without international trade:

*   Most countries wouldn’t have enough food to feed their citizens.
*   Each nation would have to rely on its own production of raw goods and assembly, rather than finding the cheapest costs in a global market. This would cause the price of goods to balloon.

### Three Challenges Facing the World

While many people are focusing on the issues and interests of their own nations, the biggest challenges of the 21st century are global, and they require an international response. They are:

**1) The nuclear challenge:** Once nuclear power became a tool of war, the threat of war meant the possibility of massive destruction. This threat was front-of-mind during the Cold War, so America, Europe, China, and the Soviet Union significantly changed geopolitical dynamics in order to avoid massive killing and nuclear annihilation. As a result, all war has declined—but with Brexit, the United Kingdom threatens this balance by abandoning the European Union and isolating itself in nationalism. **The loss of multinational cooperation and the rise in nationalism could lead to war and nuclear devastation.**

**2) The ecological challenge:** In recent decades, humans have accelerated the pace of environmental degradation. As a result, climate change threatens to make many plants and animals extinct, destroy ecological systems, cause more severe weather, hurt agricultural production, and make large areas of the globe uninhabitable. If humans don’t significantly change their behavior soon, environmental decline will reach a tipping point from which there’s no return.

**While individual nations can overhaul environmental practices, raise taxes on emissions, and develop eco-friendly technologies, the effort won’t be enough unless the whole world participates.** Further complicating the matter is the fact that some countries have more incentive to reform than others: Some nations’ economies rely on exporting fossil fuels, while others would gladly stop importing those fuels if a more affordable alternative existed. Additionally, climate change threatens to flood some nations with rising sea levels, while geological changes could actually benefit other nations. And since the effects of climate change are long-term (though looming increasingly imminently), it’s difficult for some countries to prioritize green policies over the short-term economic pains of reform.

3) **The technological challenge:** As we discussed in Part I, the simultaneous rise of both infotech and biotech threatens to transform the economy, labor market, social and political power, and even the biological makeup of humans. A nationalist viewpoint simply doesn’t think big enough to take on such a wide-reaching issue. Like climate change, if the United States imposes policies restricting certain technological development, those laws don’t prevent China from pursuing research—and when the U.S. and other countries see China developing new technologies, they’ll be likely to do the same to avoid being left behind in a competitive, nationalistic world. Additionally, whereas people can universally agree that global warming and nuclear destruction are bad, **there are a wide range of opinions on the ethics of technological developments in AI and bioengineering, which would lead to different guidelines in each country.** In order to avoid a dangerous snowball of technological development, nations need to reach an international agreement on ethical guidelines to guide technological innovation and adoption.

#### Tackle Challenges as a Global Community

Each of these three challenges individually threatens devastation—and, taken together, each one exacerbates the others, creating a vicious cycle. As climate change increases the frequency of severe weather, leads to food shortages, and puts people out of their homes, technological development is likely to accelerate in a desperate search for solutions. As technological development progresses, increasing tension and competition among nations could raise the likelihood of nuclear war. Growing tensions or an all-out war will make it all but impossible to work together to combat climate change or create guidelines for limiting the development of AI.

**Since these three massive challenges facing humans in the 21st century are all global in nature, it makes no sense to address them with nationalist politics.** Just as tribes merged into nations in order to tackle issues that were too big for a single tribe, nations now need to merge to tackle these problems that are too big for any individual country to solve. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be patriotic, maintain cultural traditions, and uphold your national identity. However, in doing so, you must also consider the best interest of the global community—because the global nature of these problems means that whatever is in the best interest of the world is also in the best interest of each nation.

You probably already maintain multiple simultaneous loyalties: You’re loyal to your family, your school, your company, your neighborhood, your city, and your country. Add to that a loyalty to your global civilization. Occasional conflicts among your loyalties are inevitable—for example, your city may propose a change that benefits the city as a whole but creates more traffic in your neighborhood. These conflicts are not insurmountable: **If municipal, state, and national politics address issues with consideration for the global impact, people can take care of their compatriots by working in the best interest of the entire globe.**

### Religion Can’t Solve 21st-Century Problems

If political models, governments, and scientists have failed to provide answers for how to navigate the immense challenges of the 21st century, could religion hold the answers? In order to explore this, we’ll look at three areas where religion falls short:

1) Technical problems, such as how African farmers should deal with droughts caused by climate change. Religion can’t solve technical problems—science can. Humans’ ancestors constantly turned to religion to solve technical problems, such as when priests prayed for rain to nourish farmers’ lands and shamans healed the ill. However, as scientific knowledge has grown, science has gradually replaced religion as the solution to technical problems: Farmers now consult meteorologists and plant drought-resistant crops, and sick people seek treatments from doctors. Religion has remained as merely a supplemental presence in these matters, adding prayers to scientific solutions.

Religious leaders aren’t experts in agriculture, medicine, and other technical fields—they are experts of interpretation, which makes them adept at offering _explanations_ for droughts and illness, rather than _solutions_. By contrast, scientists hone in on a single subject and use trial and error to find solutions that work. This is why **science has not only replaced religion as an authority for technical problems, but also why it has been adopted across different religions and cultures throughout the global civilization.**

2) Policy problems, such as how governments should prevent climate change to begin with. As is the case with technical problems, religion doesn’t offer expertise in solving policy problems. From the Bible to the Quran, the wisdom in ancient texts doesn’t apply directly to the context of modern times, at least as far as policy goes. Instead, religious and political leaders typically look for answers from modern sources, and then find a passage from a religious text that can be interpreted to justify the decision. In other words, **religion is used to _justify_ solutions, but it does not _provide_ solutions to policy problems.** This becomes clear when followers of the same religious text reach two different conclusions on the same issue—for example, American evangelicals cite the Bible in their opposition to environmental regulations, while Pope Francis declares that fighting climate change is a religious duty.

3) Identity problems, such as whether Americans should even worry about the plight of African farmers. Whereas religion is irrelevant to technical and policy problems, it contributes greatly to identity problems—but it serves to _divide_ rather than to _unite_. **Despite overwhelming similarities among different faiths, religions use ceremonies, rites, and rituals to reinforce followers’ connection to a particular religion, which inherently sets them apart from other religions.** For example, regular worship is a cornerstone of many faiths, but its distinct forms make the practices look more different than alike: Muslims kneel in prayer five times a day, Jews gather for a meal and prayers on Friday nights, and Christians go to church on Sunday mornings.

Through creating ways for followers to distinguish themselves from others, religions create cultures and mass identities with which followers can align. Mass identities make mass cooperation possible, and mass cooperation is necessary to harness human power to tackle large issues. The same principles easily translate to nationalism. However, **whether through nationalism or religion, narrowly defined identities and loyalties work against the global cooperation needed to take on the nuclear, ecological, and technological problems of the 21st century.**

Chapters 7-8: Nationalism and Religion Divide People

**Lesson:** Nationalist divisions strain debates around immigration, which further exacerbates division—but nations’ abilities to resolve disagreements about immigration will indicate how effectively they’ll be able to address global issues of the 21st century.

Immigration will increasingly be a flashpoint because of growing tensions among people of different nationalities as the global economy, increased international travel, and technology bring people together from across the world. **If governments don’t find ways of addressing the fierce debates about immigration, people will be too divided to tackle the global challenges of the 21st century.**

### Immigration Strikes a Deal Between Migrants and Countries

Immigration requires an understood deal between migrants and host countries—but **immigration opponents say that immigrants aren’t holding up their end of the deal, while immigration advocates say that host countries are falling short.** We’ll explore this debate within each of the three terms of this deal:

1.  The host country lets immigrants enter.
2.  The immigrants adopt the host country’s basic values and norms, even when it conflicts with their traditional values.
3.  As the immigrants assimilate, they gain equality and membership in the host country.

#### Term #1: Immigrants Enter the Host Country

The first aspect of immigration is the physical entry of migrants into the host country. This basic first step sparks heated debate because it taps into distinctly different beliefs.

Pro-immigrationists argue that:

*   **In our globalized world, each country has a moral duty to open its borders to refugees and migrants who seek better opportunities than those that exist in their home countries.**
*   An attempt to ban immigration would merely push it to an underground market of human traffickers and undocumented workers and children. It’s better to legalize immigration so that the government can regulate it.

Anti-immigrationists argue that:

*   Countries have no obligation to welcome foreigners, with the possible exception being refugees fleeing a neighboring country. Otherwise, **any immigration that is allowed should be considered a favor, not a duty.**
*   Along with the right to choose whether to allow migrants to enter, countries should be able to accept or deny immigrants based on any criteria they want—including professional skills, criminal records, and religion.
*   Immigrants who are allowed to enter a host country should feel grateful for the favor, regardless of their quality of life, rather than listing demands and grievances.

Of course, sometimes countries will say one thing and do another. For example, a country may turn a blind eye to undocumented workers because the economy benefits from their cheap labor, while also refusing to give them legal status. This dynamic ultimately creates an entire class of underpaid, undocumented immigrants who have no political power.

#### Term #2: Immigrants Must Assimilate

Once immigrants have entered a host country, **the nation and its citizens expect the immigrants to assimilate to local norms and values—however, people have a range of opinions about the extent to which immigrants should assimilate.** Must they change the way they dress, the way they eat, the way they socialize? If their home country is religious, must they take on a secular view? If their home country is patriarchal, must they take on a feminist view?

There are two main issues in the debate about assimilation:

1.  **Tolerance:** If tolerance is one of the host country’s central values, you could argue that immigrants must assimilate by being tolerant of all ethnicities, all religions, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights. On the other hand, you could argue that the host country is obligated to be tolerant of the immigrants—even if they are intolerant of certain groups—as long as they don’t harm anyone’s rights and freedoms.
2.  **Identity:** If you tell immigrants to assimilate, you must define the national identity to which they’re supposed to assimilate. This is especially difficult in diverse nations, where many citizens deviate from a general national archetype. For example, Italian assimilationists may push Muslim immigrants to convert to Catholicism, despite the fact that most Italian citizens don’t go to church.

#### Term #3: Immigrants Gain Equality

If immigrants assimilate to their host country, the expectation is that they will be accepted as full, equal members of that country’s society. The disagreement between pro-immigration and anti-immigration arguments lies in the timeline for this acceptance. Immigration advocates view this process on a _personal_ timescale from the immigrants’ perspective: A second-generation immigrant identifies as a citizen of the host country, and she may know little of her grandparents’ home country. Why, then, shouldn’t the host country accept her? **Immigration proponents argue that assimilated immigrants should be absorbed into society and treated like first-class citizens within a few decades of their arrival**—and if they aren’t treated fairly and they protest for better treatment, it’s the host country’s fault for failing to embrace them.

On the other hand, immigration opponents view this process on a _collective_ timeline from the nation’s perspective, and they argue that host countries need more time to absorb new members into society. **Anti-immigrationists say that it takes generations for foreigners to become part of the fabric of the country and to be fully integrated as equal citizens.** Historically, civilizations that successfully absorbed foreigners took centuries to do so.

#### Is Each Side Holding Up Its End of the Deal?

**Although generally everyone agrees upon the three terms of the deal of immigration, the conflicts arise in defining those terms**:

1.  Do countries have an obligation to accept immigrants, or is it merely a favor?
2.  To what extent should immigrants be expected to assimilate?
3.  How long should it take a host country to accept immigrants as equal citizens?

Immigration opponents think that immigrants are failing to assimilate, which frees the host country from its obligation to treat them as equal citizens, and justifies the host country’s reluctance to accept more immigrants. By contrast, immigration advocates say that immigrants are making the effort to assimilate but that host countries are neglecting their obligation to absorb the immigrants. As long as the two sides are using different definitions, there’s no way to reach a common ground.

### Immigration Ignites Culturism

Immigration puts the culture of a migrant’s home country side-by-side with the culture of the host country, highlighting the differences between the two. This comparison often leads to biased claims that one of the cultures is superior. **Typically, the host country’s culture is considered superior, because, in a sense, the house always wins.**

For example, imagine someone migrates from the fictional country of Coldia to the fictional country of Warmland. Culturally, Coldians tend to repress emotional outbursts, avoid conflict, and let issues simmer quietly, while Warmlanders value confrontation and expressions of emotion in order to resolve conflicts and move forward. When the Coldian immigrant applies for a job in Warmland, the hiring manager sees the Coldian as emotionally distant, unfriendly, and cold. The job involves a lot of interaction with employees and clients, and the hiring manager doesn’t think the Coldian would be effective, so she offers the job to a native Warmlander instead of the immigrant.

Similar situations play out in all kinds of contexts. On one hand, the hiring manager may objectively be looking for the best fit for the job. On the other hand, **a cycle develops in which immigrants are kept in lower positions because they follow different cultural norms, and that limits their ability to prosper in their new country.** These are the effects of culturism.

Although it’s often called racism, culturism is more common today than racism, which is based on old notions of racial superiority based on biology. However, science has debunked such ideas, and now discrimination is based on culture rather than biology—hence, culturism. This shift brings two main changes:

1.  **Culturists can be somewhat more tolerant than racists, because the discrimination is based on a person’s culture, which can change, rather than her biology, which is fixed.** However, this also means that culturists are inclined to pressure people to assimilate to the supposedly superior culture, and they’re likely to be more critical when people don’t assimilate. For example, culturists might accuse Black Americans of not trying hard enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and climb the corporate ladder, while they overlook the fact that layers of institutional discrimination stand in their way.
2.  **Culturists can make valid arguments in some cases—**as in the example with the Coldian job applicant. The Coldian’s culture dictated different social etiquette, and those differences would be a legitimate challenge in succeeding in the job. Still, is it unethical to refuse someone an opportunity because of her cultural norms?

It’s difficult to draw the line between cultural differences and discrimination. In fact, culturism clearly crosses into bigotry in three ways:

1.  A particular culture may be superior in a specific context—such as in the Coldian example, a Warmlander would probably be a better fit for the job because it deals with other Warmlanders. However, the argument becomes discriminatory when **people confuse _local_ or _context-specific_ cultural superiority with _objective_ superiority**, such as thinking a Warmlander is always the best job candidate for any position in any country.
2.  Some cultural claims are true within a specific scope—for example, Coldian culture is less tolerant of confrontation than Warmland culture. However, **cultural claims become flawed when they’re overgeneralized and ambiguous**, such as saying that Coldian culture is intolerant. Such a statement doesn’t specify what or whom Coldians don’t tolerate.
3.  Culturism may accurately assess a culture on a broad scale. However, **issues arise when culturists overlook individual differences.** Within any culture, there are people who don’t fit the general stereotype, and others who fall on a spectrum somewhere in between. This becomes dangerous when, for example, the Warmland hiring manager refuses to consider any Coldian on the assumption that they’re all distant and averse to conflict.

---

Like culturism, **immigration is difficult to resolve because it is nuanced—both sides have legitimate arguments, but the friction lies in deciding where to draw the line.** Difficult as it may be, each nation’s ability to reach an agreement on immigration will be a major indicator of its potential to come together with the rest of the global civilization to address the looming challenges of the 21st century.

Chapter 9: Immigration Exacerbates Tensions Between Cultures

Reflect on your definitions of the terms of immigration, and how well your beliefs align with your country’s policies.

Exercise: How Do You Define the Terms of Immigration?

**Lesson:** Don’t waste too much energy worrying about terrorism, because it is a relatively minor threat unless terrorists get nuclear weapons. Similarly, military warfare is an increasingly remote possibility in the modern world.

In recent decades, fear of terrorism has gripped the world, ignited wars, and shaped politics—and that’s by design. With the exception of outliers like 9/11, most acts of terrorism kill very few people; far more people die in traffic accidents or from diabetes. As the name suggests, **terrorism is meant primarily to incite terror, but it generally causes little physical damage.**

In an attack, most military strategists aim to destroy the enemy’s most powerful weapons and essential resources, in order to handicap any retaliation. However, terrorists don’t have the power to inflict such damage, so their attacks often do little to harm their enemies’ weapons, equipment, and infrastructure. Due to their weakness in resources and manpower, terrorists’ only hope is to aggravate the enemy so much that it overreacts, and that the overreaction creates enough chaos and instability that the power balance tips in the terrorists’ favor. In other words, **terrorists instigate their enemies to cause the damage that the terrorists don’t have the strength to create.**

A terrorist is like a fly that wants to destroy a china shop. The fly isn’t strong enough to tip anything over, so when a bull enters the china shop, the fly buzzes in its ear until the bull starts thrashing and causing destruction. The 9/11 terrorists were flies that buzzed in America’s ear and caused mass fear and confusion. In an effort to calm the public’s fears, America responded with a show of power and strength by declaring a War on Terror, in which it thrashed through the Middle East. America’s efforts ultimately destabilized the Middle East and created space for the terrorists to seize more power.

### Terrorism Aims to Undermine Safety and Stability

Terrorism is only effective because citizens of the United States and other centralized countries are unaccustomed to political violence. Before modern times, political violence was a fact of life in most of the world: Individuals and groups gained political power only through violent force. As the centuries passed, many governments were able to reduce and nearly eradicate political violence, to the point that their citizens came to expect protection from such violence in daily life. This shift had two effects that made terrorism a viable strategy:

1.  **The public began to perceive even small attacks as major threats.** Consequently, terrorists could make a small impact with few casualties and still create the intended fear and chaos.
2.  **The government’s legitimacy became dependent upon its ability to prevent political violence in the public sphere.** As a result, even minor terrorist attacks do greater damage by undermining the government’s legitimacy.

Terrorism causes public fear, which pushes the government to prove its power and defend its authority, and that generally amounts to an overreaction—which plays right into the terrorists’ hands. In fact, the safer a country is and the less political violence it experiences, the more vulnerable it is to falling victim to terrorism. **Instead of overreacting, governments should understand that terrorists don’t have enough power to do much harm, as long as government officials keep their cool and make prudent decisions.**

In order to effectively fight terrorism, nations must respond on three fronts:

1.  **Government:** Officials must resist the temptation to make a public show of their response to terrorism. Instead, they should take clandestine actions to hurt the networks that support the terrorists.
2.  **Media:** Terrorism is all about creating a spectacle to incite fear, and publicity is crucial. The media must resist playing into this by overblowing the threat of terrorism. Instead, the media should keep the actual threat of terrorism in perspective with other dangers.
3.  **Public:** Terrorism only works if it provokes fear and confusion. Instead of feeling terrorized, average citizens can fight terrorism by understanding terrorists’ tactics and not inflating the threat of danger.

Although terrorists are only a minor threat now, they could become exponentially more dangerous if they obtain nuclear weapons, or if they launch cyberterrorism or bioterrorism attacks. If those scenarios happen, the terrorists will not only create a spectacle but also cause serious damage, and the government would need to take stronger action to meet the level of danger.

In the meantime, **the government and the public must be careful to distinguish the _real current_ threat of terrorists from the _potential future_ threat of terrorists.** America’s War on Terror serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when a powerful country overreacts: Not only did years of war create mass destruction in the Middle East, it also wasted trillions of dollars that could have gone to more constructive efforts, such as fighting climate change and researching treatments and cures for diseases.

### Military Wars Face Extinction

Despite the rise in terrorism, the last few decades have been the most peaceful in the history of humankind. Throughout much of history, war was a necessary means of nations’ growth. National powers violently conquered other territories in pursuit of land, capital, manpower, control of trade, and geopolitical status. However, military wars in which soldiers battle on the ground (or at sea or in the air) in order to raise their nation’s economic prosperity and global power are largely extinct.

**Whereas the most valuable economic assets used to be physical**—such as land, gold, and goods—**modern wealth is information and technology, which are impossible to capture through war.** Additionally, many nations are reluctant to instigate war for various reasons, such as:

1.  Since Hiroshima, countries have feared that launching an attack would cause the enemy to retaliate with a nuclear weapon.
2.  Countries fear cyberwarfare, which enables the enemy to retaliate within minutes and can cause major destruction in many places simultaneously. For example, the enemy could interfere with air traffic in New York, shut down the electric grid in Los Angeles, and rig trains to crash in Chicago.
3.  **In modern war, the stakes are high and the rewards are minimal.** Even when a country wins a war, it doesn’t necessarily experience a significant increase in economic prosperity and international power.

Despite recent peaceful times and the declining returns of war, international tensions have been building since the 2008 financial crisis. Still, war is not inevitable. The world might be moving past warfare, since the Cold War proved that conflicts can be resolved without fatalities. **Today, most successful countries have improved their geopolitical status by improving their _economies_ rather than their _militaries_.**

On the other hand, it’s foolish to underestimate the potential for war. Despite the declining benefits of war, human emotion can always factor into leaders’ decisions. Given how complicated the world is, even seemingly rational decisions can lead to stupid actions. Additionally, anticipating war makes war more likely, because it causes countries to increase their troops, bulk up their arms supplies, and act less cooperatively and more suspiciously in international relations—all of this not only prepares for war, but is also likely to instigate it.

#### Case Study: Russia’s Invasion of Crimea

The only successful conquest by a major global power in the 21st century was Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Part of the reason for Russia’s success was that Ukraine did little to resist, and no other country directly intervened. Russia wisely waged a limited war: It targeted a fairly weak nation and limited its attack to avoid embroiling any other countries. In fact, after its success in Crimea, Russia tried to attack other regions of Ukraine, but it failed in the face of tougher resistance.

**Although Russia’s war raised its geopolitical position, it also raised international animosity and distrust of Russia.** Additionally, the venture was an economic loss for the country overall. By contrast, during the same period, China greatly increased its economic prosperity without any international conflicts.

For most nations in the world, the prospect of war is unappealing and probably promises more losses than rewards. However, if world leaders follow Russia’s lead—or find another means of waging successful wars in a modern context—the damage could be unprecedented.

Part 3: Perspective | Chapters 10-11: Terrorism and War Are Minor Threats

**Lesson:** People have inflated perceptions of their culture’s importance and contributions to the world.

Even when war brings high costs and promises little reward, there are a host of reasons that leaders do it anyway. One major reason is that national leaders—as well as many people in general—overestimate the importance of their own culture and its impact on the world. Greeks, Chinese, and Hindus are just a few of the cultures that claim that history began with their ancestors’ achievements. However, this skewed view shows a lack of humility and a disregard for history. In reality, **morality, creativity, art, and spirituality can’t be credited to any single culture because they’re wired into human DNA.**

Although nearly every culture perpetuates similarly self-important myths, we’ll break down the flaws in this view by examining the Jewish culture and claims of Jewish achievements.

### Case Study: Jewish Culture

Children are raised with a misunderstanding of their culture’s importance, as school history lessons emphasize certain events, downplay others, and frame history based on how it affected their ancestors. For instance, when Israeli students learn about the French Revolution, the lesson focuses on Jews’ political and legal status in the French Republic. **When this egocentric perspective shapes an entire community’s understanding of human history and the modern world, it’s no wonder that they inflate their ancestors’ contributions to humanity.**

In reality, Judaism’s biggest contribution to humanity was indirect: Judaism gave rise to Christianity and Islam, which are two of the most influential religions in human history. Christianity and Islam were at the root of some of the greatest achievements and atrocities in history. However, Judaism deserves only as much credit and blame for Christianity’s and Islam’s contributions as Freud’s mother deserves for his achievements.

Let’s examine some specific claims of Jewish achievement:

**Morality:** Jews may claim credit for morality, but tens of thousands of years before the advent of Judaism, Stone Age tribes developed their own moral codes. In fact, all social animals—from dolphins to monkeys—have evolved to follow ethical codes that promote group cooperation. Researchers have studied chimpanzee groups in which the alpha male has protected disabled members of the group or adopted orphaned young. The chimps didn’t need the Bible or the Torah to tell them to look after the poor and needy.

**Monotheism:** There’s evidence that Judaism was not the first or only ancient faith to worship just one god. Furthermore, whichever religion came up with monotheism should be blamed—not credited—because monotheism has been the root of many religious wars and persecutions. If you believe that there is just one god that everyone should worship, you’re more inclined to be intolerant of other people’s gods and rituals. By contrast, if you believe that there are multiple gods, it’s easier to accept that other people celebrate different gods and worship them differently than you worship.

**Science:** During the 19th and 20th centuries, Jews made significant contributions to science. However, Jewish scientists’ achievements came only after the Jewish Enlightenment and secularization caused many Jews to expand their view beyond strictly religious perspectives. Furthermore, these accomplishments should be credited to the individual scientists rather than to their religion. In other words, the scientific achievements were not those of Jews specifically, but rather of scientists who happened to be Jewish.

Chapter 12: People Overestimate Their Culture’s Importance

You may be spreading your culture’s self-important myths without realizing it.

Exercise: Are You Overestimating Your Culture’s Importance?

**Lesson:** Many religious laws are meant to keep social order, but people are driven to cooperate regardless of religious convictions.

Just as people wrongly credit their cultures for contributing to society and maintaining social order, people mistakenly attribute morality to religion. In reality, humans are hard-wired to maintain social order, and religion has worked both for and against this cause

When people talk about God, they can be referring to one of two versions:

1.  **The cosmic God is grand and mysterious**, and humans know nothing concrete about Him. He is the answer to all unanswered questions: What is the meaning of life? What shaped the world? This is the philosophers’ God, which embodies human ignorance and speculation.
2.  **The lawgiver God is strict and judgmental**, and humans know plenty about Him and His preferences. He has specific rules about what people can wear, eat, drink, and do. This is the God of homophobes, jihadists, and Crusaders.

Religious people talk about both gods as one—declaring that He is a mysterious force, but also that He has very clear rules about gay marriage. However, these two views of God are contradictory. **If God is an enigma, how could he have also delivered so many specific and minute ordinances about the ways that humans conduct themselves?**

Holy books such as the Bible and Quran try to draw the connection between the cosmic God and the lawgiver God, but these texts smack of human interpretation. It’s not logical that God Himself—whichever God that may be—wrote these texts not only to proclaim the principles of a moral life, but also to make decrees that were specific to the time and place when the texts were written. It makes more sense that humans wrote these texts in order to maintain social order and legitimize cultural norms.

While the rules of the lawgiver God may have successfully kept peace and social order in many eras and cultures, they have also been the source of much violence and discrimination. People have committed countless atrocities in the name of God. By contrast, **secular laws have achieved the same social order as religious laws, but they have not inspired the same level of self-righteous violence.**

Despite what some may say, humans don’t need divine law or the threat of hell in order to act morally. Morality is baked into the DNA of humans and all social animals, as we mentioned in the last chapter. As social animals, humans are motivated to do what’s best for their communities, because relationships play a large role in determining human happiness. Additionally, **humans are motivated to be good to people outside of their immediate communities for reasons that are separate from religion**, including:

1.  People fear retaliation—in other words, don’t harm others, because you wouldn’t want them to harm you in return.
2.  Societal structures like commerce only work when there’s trust between strangers (in this case, the merchant and the consumer).
3.  Violent and harmful acts start with the aggressor’s violent and harmful thoughts. A peaceful, happy person doesn’t steal or kill, so most people aren’t naturally inclined to commit serious harmful acts.

### Secularism Upholds a Code of Ethics

Since belief in God is not necessary for morality, let’s examine the merits of secularism. Religion demands faith and commitment to one God and one set of beliefs, which necessarily closes followers off to other ideas. By contrast, **secular people consider wisdom and morality to be common human traits, regardless of faith or background, which makes secular people more accepting of different beliefs and identities.** Instead of committing to a set of beliefs, secular people adhere to a core set of ethics, which includes:

1.  **Truth:** The most important secular value is truth that’s based on evidence and observation, as opposed to a truth dictated by faith. Whereas religious followers find their truth from faith leaders and in holy texts, secular people don’t look to any single source as the primary holder of truth—instead, they seek pieces of truth wherever it exists. Although science and religion aren’t mutually exclusive, the secular attitude toward finding truth through evidence and observation is the foundation of scientific discovery.
2.  **Compassion:** Secular people value compassion for everyone, regardless of their membership to any religion or group. Whereas religious followers preach compassion as a form of honoring and obeying God’s wishes, secular people value compassion because of a general appreciation for human suffering. As a result, the secular form of compassion remains stable, while faith-based compassion can waver if it conflicts with God’s desire to shun non-believers or punish sinners.
3.  **Equality:** The secular values of truth and compassion produce a strong commitment to equality. Since secular people approach issues based on truth and information, and they recognize suffering as suffering—no matter who’s experiencing it—they give the same weight to the rights, experiences, and grievances of everyone equally.
4.  **Freedom:** Freedom is essential to pursuing truth, spreading compassion, and achieving equality. Secular people believe that individuals should be free to question, doubt, explore, and reach their own conclusions. For this reason, they don’t appoint any leader, text, or institution as the arbiter of true and false, right and wrong.
5.  **Courage to admit ignorance:** The courage to admit ignorance and mistakes is absolutely essential to the secular commitment to truth: If you don’t acknowledge what you don’t know, then you’ll never seek more information. By contrast, religion often instills a fear of the unknown and deters followers from admitting any questions or holes in the information set forth by the faith. When people fear that their truth could collapse, they’re much more likely to be violent and aggressive to perceived threats to their beliefs than people who are open to learning and evolving.
6.  **Responsibility:** Responsibility is foundational to secularism because, in the absence of an all-powerful God to right the world’s wrongs, that duty falls on people. For this reason, secular people take great pride in humankind’s accomplishments, from resolving social issues to making scientific discoveries. By the same token, secular people can’t blame war, disease, or climate change on God’s will—rather, they must take accountability and ask how they can help resolve the problem.

Secular people recognize that these values are innate in all humans, so they can appreciate when religions uphold the same values. As such, **secular societies embrace religious people as long as the faithful follow secular values above religious codes.** For example, although Judaism proclaims that Jews are the chosen people—and, thus, superior to gentiles—Jews are expected to respect everyone’s equality in a secular society. However, secular society does not oblige religious people to forego their beliefs or ceremonies. Secular people’s appreciation for freedom extends to everyone’s right to worship according to her individual beliefs.

#### Secular Movements Can Become Dogmas

With its commitment to the pursuit of truth, compassion, equality, and freedom, secularism sets ideals that are difficult—if not impossible—for people to achieve, and the challenge is even greater for large societies. As a result, **many secular movements have morphed into dogmas.**

One example is Marxism, which began with Karl Marx’s conviction that people should abandon religion and seek their own truths. Over time, the difficulty of the truth-seeking and the challenges of the war and revolution eroded Marx’s secular vision. When Stalin held power, he transformed Marxism: Stalin declared that it was too difficult for the general public to uncover the truth about the world, and that they should simply trust whatever the Soviet Communist Party said.

**While some mutated dogmas are harmful, others have positive effects.** An example of this is the doctrine of human rights, which began as a secular view of freedom and equality that eventually became a dogma of humans’ natural right to life and liberty. In reality, people aren’t born with these inalienable rights—but the belief in them has limited the harm of authoritarians and protected billions of people from brutal effects of violence and poverty.

This transformation isn’t limited to secularism—every religion and ideology has some form of distortion, or shadow. For example, Christianity’s teachings of faith and love have been twisted many times to produce holy wars and the Inquisition. **Although the shadow doesn’t represent an ideology’s true values, followers must still examine how these mutations happen.** Secularism’s commitment to truth and admitting mistakes should make its followers particularly willing to take this hard look.

Chapters 13-14: People Don’t Need God to Keep Social Order

Reflect on how you distinguish right from wrong.

Exercise: What Guides Your Morals?

**Lesson:** You’ll never be able to understand everything about how the world works—and that’s OK, as long as you recognize your ignorance and don’t overestimate your knowledge.

In order to find truth, you must recognize what you know—and what you don’t know. Modern society has an incredible amount of information at its fingertips, yet, individually, people know far less than their ancestors. In the Stone Age, hunter-gatherers knew how to hunt, make fire, and escape predators. **Today, individuals don’t need the same breadth of knowledge because they have access to a global network of collective knowledge and others’ expertise.**

Our ability to access collective knowledge has been critical to humankind’s incredible progress and achievements—but it’s also led to two dangerous phenomena:

1.  The knowledge illusion: **People mistake group knowledge for individual wisdom, and their tendency to underestimate their own ignorance is having dangerous consequences.** Lawmakers with no scientific training are creating policies on climate change that affect not just the nation but the world (as we discussed in Chapter 7).
2.  Groupthink: **People become so convinced of and loyal to the views of their community—**whether it’s their social group, political party, or society—**that they fail to recognize when those views are flawed.** Furthermore, people are typically surrounded by other people and sources of information that merely serve as an echo chamber, affirming the beliefs they already hold.

Corporate and political leaders are even more susceptible to groupthink, because they’re so busy ruling that they don’t have the time to reexamine issues and reach independent conclusions. **In order to truly evaluate a belief and to come up with new insights, you need the opportunity to waste time.** You must have time to come up with and sift through many new ideas—including many dead-ends—in order to hit on something insightful.

Besides being short on time, leaders also have the burden of power, which warps their perception of truth. First, when you have power, your perspective naturally skews to find ways to use your power—and your justification for using power may not always reflect the truth. Even if you are judicious about wielding your power, those around you will try to sway you to use it for their benefit. Second, leaders typically reach a position of power because they strongly represent the views of the group. The powerful people who surround leaders are invested in maintaining the order based on those existing views, not questioning them and jeopardizing social structures.

The dangers of groupthink and the knowledge illusion will become more severe as the 21st century progresses. Technology, the economy, and global politics will become increasingly complex, individuals’ understanding will continue to shrink, and—as we discussed—the stakes will continue to rise. **While it’s unrealistic for individuals to try to close their knowledge gaps, the best they can do is to acknowledge their ignorance and act with humility.**

### Humans’ Sense of Justice Is Outdated

Like morality and ethics, humans’ sense of justice developed during the times of ancient hunter-gatherer societies. Human codes of right and wrong were developed to suit small communities of a few hundred people in a small geographic area—and they don’t translate seamlessly to our modern world of millions of people across the globe.

Justice requires an understanding of cause and effect, which was much simpler in ancient times. In the Stone Age, if you stole your neighbor’s food, the effect of the theft was immediate and apparent: The neighbor and her family would go to sleep hungry that night. By contrast, **most of the injustices in the modern world are embedded in systems and structures—such as systems of politics and trade—which makes it almost impossible to know all of the consequences of your seemingly small actions.** For example, you may think you’re innocently shopping for groceries and clothes, while others blame you for participating in an inhumane system of food production and perpetuating child labor in sweatshops halfway across the world. It’s almost impossible to know whether or not you’re doing wrong, because the global system in which we live does wrong on your behalf and without your awareness.

Some people argue that individuals’ intentions should be the measure of their morality: If they meant no harm and didn’t know they were doing anything wrong, then you can’t blame them for it. However, many of the greatest atrocities in human history were facilitated by people who were ignorant of their supporting roles. For example, the post office managers in 1930s Germany may have had no intention of aiding genocide, yet their work was vital to the distribution of Nazi propaganda and recruitment.

### People Struggle to Understand Big Issues

Even if people make an effort to understand the effects of their actions, the tangled interconnectedness of the modern world is far too complex to fully grasp. Hunter-gatherers developed the ability to comprehend conflicts between individuals, within small communities, and among tribes—but **humans’ brains haven’t evolved to grasp justice on a global scale.** At the same time, humans’ interconnectedness makes mutual understanding more important than ever before.

When a problem gets too big and complicated to grasp, people often use one of four shortcuts to attempt to understand it:

1.  **People shrink and simplify big, complex problems.** For example, in a complicated political matter with a lot of nuanced history, such as the Syrian civil war, people are tempted to simplify the matter by calling one side good and the other bad.
2.  **People zoom in on the story of one individual** who’s impacted by the problem, rather than trying to grasp the broad scope of the issue. For example, people may focus on the story of one impoverished, hungry child instead of the massive problem of poverty and food insecurity.
3.  **People concoct or latch onto conspiracy theories** because they make sense of something that’s otherwise confusing to understand—but these stories generally have little or no connection to reality. For example, many people believe that a small group of superrich elites is controlling media, politics, and social issues throughout the world for their own benefit. However, the reality is much more complex.
4.  **People essentially give up on trying to understand things themselves and choose a dogma to follow.** It’s easier to follow whatever that religion, theory, institution, or leader dictates than to decide for themselves what’s right and wrong. For example, people who throw their hands up at trying to understand and reverse climate change may turn to religion and declare that global warming is God’s will.

Since humans often can’t understand and address complicated issues as individuals, people could turn to their communities to work together to make sense of the world—but this approach leads to its own problems. A community can tackle an issue _within the community_, but when the problems stretch _beyond the community_, attempts to understand are likely to lead to biased groupthink. **In order to address the global problems we face, we need a global community to work together to understand them.**

Part 4: Truth | Chapters 15-16: You Know Less Than You Think

**Lesson:** Humans are so driven to make sense of the world through stories that they’re often willing to believe lies.

We are living in a post-truth society, in which lies aren’t merely spread in social media posts, but they are also used to justify government actions. For example, when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, the Russian government repeatedly denied responsibility for the invasion. The government rationalized that its lie served a higher purpose, which was to reunify Ukraine with Russia.

How did we get to this era of post-truth? The phenomenon has a long history. In fact, the great accomplishments of human progress are owed in part to humans’ ability to create and get others to believe fictional stories in order to work together toward a collective goal. In other words, **humans’ penchant for stories allows strangers to cooperate for common causes.** Storytelling is used in this way by different kinds of institutions, including:

1.  **Religion:** The stories found in the Bible, Torah, Quran, and other holy texts have inspired millions of people to work together to build cathedrals, fight oppression, and even fight bloody wars.
2.  **Nations:** Governments spread stories in order to justify their actions and spur public support for their causes. For example, Japan faked attacks on itself in order to justify invading China, and Israel ignored the existence of Palestinians in defending its pursuit of land.
3.  **Political movements:** The leading forces in political movements promote stories—or propaganda—to reinforce an image of their politics. For example, Joseph Stalin took a photo with a young, smiling girl and posted the image everywhere in order to promote the fantasy of a happy childhood under Soviet rule, despite the reality of terror and brutality.
4.  **Corporations:** Big businesses create stories to sell their products. For example, Coca-Cola fills its ads with images of young, healthy, vibrant Coke drinkers to weave a story that Coca-Cola is linked to youth and vitality, even though drinking soda leads to obesity and other health issues.

In order for these stories to be effective, they can’t be too far-fetched—otherwise, people will dismiss them. On the other hand, they can’t be too close to the truth, because the truth typically lacks the power to inspire and motivate people. Additionally, effective stories don’t have to entirely pull the wool over people’s eyes: **People are often willing to believe something enough to act on it, even though, at their core, they know the story is fiction.** For example, money is a human invention, and it has no inherent value beyond the paper and metal it’s made from. Most people understand this if they stop and think about it, but that doesn’t make them any less upset when they lose a $100 bill.

Humans’ willingness to swallow fiction doesn’t erase the truth, and people should still seek the truth—especially when believing and perpetuating the fiction causes harm. **Everyone has a responsibility to question and investigate the information she consumes, and to keep an eye out for biases she unknowingly has.** You can’t know everything, but you can take two important steps:

1.  **Pay for quality information.** When news sources offer their content for free, you get a low-quality product. Furthermore, you’re giving your attention—which is a valuable asset—to the advertisers on that site in exchange for the low-quality information. Truth is critical in guiding how you act, especially in the face of the 21st-century challenges we’ve discussed. Paying for high-quality information is worth the investment.
2.  **Do your research on topics that matter to you.** It’s impossible to become an expert in everything, but research issues that are especially important to you. Read scientific journals and other reliable sources to gain a full understanding of the subject.

(Shortform note: [Read Chapter 2 of our summary of Sapiens for more about the role in society of collective fictions, such as money and religion.](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.shortform.com/app/book/sapiens/chapter-2&sa=D&ust=1600546466819000&usg=AFQjCNEYEglGoij2LFuI0GMz0VZhGFzmVA))

### People Fear Disconnection From Reality

Since stories are a powerful force in informing and influencing masses of people, science fiction plays a major role in shaping people’s understanding of technological, economic, and social developments—regardless of how factual it is. As such, **science fiction has a huge responsibility to accurately represent modern technologies and the challenges they present.**

One common modern science fiction theme is that of humans becoming manipulated by technology to the point that they are disconnected from reality and their true selves. This plays out similarly in movies like _The Matrix_ and _The Truman Show_, in which the main characters discover that they’re trapped in artificial worlds, in which their entire realities are programmed. When they finally escape, the “real” worlds they find resemble the artificial worlds they left.

**These science fiction stories reflect people’s fear of being trapped in a box—some form of non-reality—and divorced from their real selves, authentic emotions, and genuine relationships.** However, the truth is that you _already are_ trapped in such a box: your mind. Your mind shapes how you interpret and experience everything. Furthermore, your mind is trapped in the box of society, which influences the way you interpret your experiences. For example, TV, movies, songs, and art all mold the way you understand, express, and receive love.

People imagine authenticity as freedom from these boxes, but that doesn’t exist. There’s no way out of the boxes, because, at the innermost level, even your identity is an illusion formed by your brain’s wiring. Instead, **authenticity exists _inside_ the matrix.** If you experience pain, it doesn’t matter if you cut off your finger or if you’re hooked up to wires simulating the feeling of chopping off a finger—pain is pain, and it feels real to you.

### Your “Self” Is Complex

Some science fiction acknowledges this reality. One example is the 2015 Pixar Studios animated movie _Inside Out_, which explores the inner workings of the brain of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. Riley’s mind is managed by a cast of characters that each represent a different emotion, including Joy, Sadness, and Anger. The movie illustrates that **no single emotion defines a person—rather, her personality and identity are composed of a variety of emotions and selves.**

Another, darker example is the 1931 book _Brave New World_, which imagines a reality in which a World Government uses social engineering and biotechnology to keep everyone perpetually content. There are no rebellions, no wars, no suffering, and no fear. When a lone detractor named John the Savage calls for the public to escape this controlling system, they have no motivation to do so. The World Government has created a sort of utopia—but John insists that there is something dystopian about its uniformity and sterility.

John the Savage is arrested for trying to incite rebellion, and he has a conversation with the World Controller, Mustapha Mond. John tells Mustapha that the World Government’s excessive control has eliminated truth, beauty, nobility, and heroism in order to make everyone happy; Mustapha replies that nobility and heroism are not needed if there is no war and tragedy. Finally, Mustapha tells John that if he wants the freedom to experience life’s highs and lows, he must claim the right to be unhappy, ill, old, anxious, and miserable. John claims all of these, and he goes off to live in isolation, beyond the control of the World Government. However, John is never able to fully escape the influence of the World Government, because people under their control hear about John and come to see him as an oddity. Eventually, John becomes tired of being a spectacle and hangs himself.

The only way John was able to escape the World Government—the matrix, the box—was to escape his “self,” albeit by suicide. Although this is grim, **the concept of shedding a narrow definition of self could be the key to making it through the 21st century.**

Chapters 17-18: People Love Stories—Even When They’re Lies

**Lesson:** The modern education system is designed to prepare students for a job market that’s becoming obsolete.

The education that children today receive will determine how well-equipped they are not only to navigate but also to shape the future. However, **the modern education system is not fit to prepare children for the 21st century.**

First, humans don’t know what the world will look like in 50 or 100 years. This has always been true to some extent, but, in the past, people could reasonably predict what kinds of jobs would exist and generally how government and politics would function by the time their children and grandchildren became adults. Now, **technology makes it impossible to know which jobs will become obsolete, what the global political system will look like, and whether the human body will have new capabilities as a result of bioengineering.** Without having a reasonable expectation of the future, it’s impossible to know how to prepare children for it.

Second, the focus and the goal of the modern education system are outdated. In centuries past, information was scarce. Depending on where you lived, you had access to books, radio, and television—and whatever information you received may have made it through censorship screening by the government. School aimed to arm students with more information, in order to broaden their scope of knowledge and view of the world. By contrast, now people face an information overload, and instead of trying to censor information, some governments add to the noise by distributing false and misleading information to confuse people. As a result, schools no longer need to pile more information on students. Instead, they must teach **students to make sense of the vast amount of information they take in**, to distinguish between trustworthy and questionable sources, and to weave the pieces of reliable information into a comprehensive view of the world.

Third, schools currently put too much emphasis on teaching students skills, such as coding and solving math equations. In the past, such skills prepared students for future jobs. However, at a time when the future job market is a mystery, this model is likely to waste students’ and teachers’ time on tasks that will ultimately be performed by robots. Instead, experts suggest teaching students “the four Cs”—communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. Additionally, **schools should teach fewer technical skills and more life skills, such as how to learn new things, cope with change, and maintain mental balance amid instability.**

The only thing that’s certain about the rest of the 21st century is that it will be filled with constant change and uncertainty. Historically, the first part of a person’s life was a period of learning and building an identity, and the rest of her life was spent working and fine-tuning her identity. As the 21st century progresses, this clean division will be replaced by ongoing learning and adapting. As we discussed in Chapter 2, future workers should be prepared to switch careers every decade or so, as their previous professions become automated and obsolete. This way of life will be immensely stressful, so children will be far better served by learning to maintain mental stability amid constant change than they will be by memorizing the Pythagorean theorem.

It’s clear that the existing educational model is not effective for 21st-century needs—but, so far, there is no viable model to replace it. A new educational system needs to be designed to fit an uncertain future, and it needs to be scalable so that it can be as effective in rural Ecuador as it is in wealthy suburban California.

### Advice to Children and Teens

The uncertainty of the future weighs most heavily on today’s children and teens, who face a conundrum:

*   **They can’t trust adults to lead them into the future.** Not only are the adults equally uncertain about what the future holds, but they’re also more likely to be entrenched in the past and unable to adapt.
*   **They can’t rely on technology to guide them.** Technology can be a useful tool, but it can easily manipulate its users. As Big Data and algorithms become increasingly powerful, big tech companies are in a race to learn enough about people to influence them.
*   **They can’t simply listen to their hearts** to tell them what’s right. The voice in their heads is actually an echo of government propaganda, commercial marketing, and other outside influences.

If children and teens today want to determine their own destinies, they must get to know themselves by also understanding all the external forces that influence them. Getting to know yourself has always been an ingredient in a rich life, but in the 21st century, the stakes are higher. **With the rise of technology, you’re actually in a race to get to know yourself faster than the algorithms can get to know you—and the winner gets to decide how you behave, what you buy, and who you vote for.**

Part 5: Meaning | Chapter 19: The Education System Is Outdated

Reflect on whether your education gave you the tools to succeed as an adult.

Exercise: How Well Did Your Education Prepare You?

**Lesson:** People are driven to uncover their reason for living, and they often look for answers in meaning-of-life stories or within themselves.

As people prepare for a new reality and new challenges in the 21st century, they’ll inevitably ponder, “What is the meaning of life?” When people ask this question, what they’re really asking is, “What is the meaning of _my_ life? What is _my_ role in the universe?” Humans have been asking these questions throughout history. More often than not, people want the answer to fit into a story, because humans love stories, and they use stories to make sense out of the world.

### Meaning-of-Life Stories Are Illogical

Throughout human history, people have come up with countless stories to explain the meaning of life, including:

*   **All life forms on the planet are part of an eternal circle of life, and you have a unique role in that cycle.** The purpose of life is to find your function and to fulfill it. This explanation is powerful because it claims that an infinite cycle connects all people from the past, present, and future. The circle-of-life explanation also assigns everyone an identity and reason for living, and you merely have to discover your identity and carry out your duties—as long as you do that, you can overcome all obstacles in life with peace of mind because you know that you’re living out your purpose.
*   **The world began, conflicts arose, and conflicts continue to be an ever-present aspect of life until a future resolution or ultimate judgment day.** According to this story, when that judgment day comes, people who helped the cause will enjoy the fruits of their labors. This storyline transcends Muslim teachings to Zionist nationalist beliefs and _The Communist Manifesto_. Regardless of the context, this explanation gives meaning to small, day-to-day actions that will put you on the right side of judgment day—whether that entails educating others about Islam or boycotting exploitive capitalist companies.

Each of these explanations has logical holes in it. For example, if you believe that you are part of an eternal circle of life, have you taken into account the fact that eternity will stretch far past human existence? What will the meaning of life be when there are no people around? Or, if you’re a Zionist and your meaning-of-life story begins with Judaism and the Jewish people, was there no meaning to life during the nearly 2 million years of human existence prior? Ultimately, **it doesn’t matter to most people if their version of the meaning of life is incomplete—**the story just needs to have two features:

1.  It gives you a function in the world.
2.  It extends beyond your life. The story doesn’t have to be infinite, as long as it places your life into a larger scope.

#### People Find Meaning Through Legacies and Love

**Many people believe that, as long as they leave behind some kind of legacy, their life will have meaning.** Legacies can be:

*   Cultural, like a work of art
*   Biological, as in children and future descendants
*   Intangible, such as acts of kindness and efforts to improve the world

This explanation gives people the comfort of believing that, as long as something exists to keep their memories alive, their lives will have been worth remembering. However, there are holes in this logic, as well. First, cultural legacies are easily lost, destroyed, or made irrelevant as time goes on. Second, there’s no guarantee that a person’s family line will live on for centuries, let alone eternity—and if they do, there’s no way to know how or whether future descendants will make their lives meaningful. Third, acts of kindness don’t have inherent meaning; if a person’s purpose is to help others, what is the purpose of those other people’s lives?

Some people don’t try to find meaning that will last beyond their lives. Instead, they believe that their purpose is to find true love. While this may not be meaningful to anyone else in the world, it feels meaningful to the people involved—or, at the very least, being in love distracts people from worrying about the meaning of life.

#### Meaning-of-Life Stories Provide Identities

People believe in these fictional meaning-of-life stories in order to forge their identities. People typically don’t put their full faith in any single meaning-of-life story—instead, they often believe pieces of different stories, thus creating multiple identities.

**An individual’s various identities often contradict, but humans are so good at compartmentalizing their identities that they generally don’t even notice or acknowledge the contradictions.** For example, a conservative activist who’s also a devout Christian is likely to vote against welfare programs and in favor of maintaining gun rights—however, these stances go against the teachings that Christians should help the poor and opt for nonviolence.

### Rituals Foster People’s Belief in Stories

If most people really examined their meaning-of-life stories, the stories would fall apart. But that doesn’t matter to most people, because:

1.  **The stories are deeply ingrained.** People typically learn these stories as children, and they weave the stories into their personal identities. The stories become so embedded that people seldom stop to question them.
2.  **Human societies are built upon these stories.** Within a country, a religion, or another form of community, laws, social norms, and institutions are based upon these stories. Social structures reinforce these stories and also scare people away from questioning the stories’ validity, for fear of collapsing social systems.

If these factors explain _why_ humans are compelled to believe these stories, then _how_, exactly, do people build their faith in them? The answer is ceremonies, rites, and rituals that turn the mundane into something mystic, which gives the sense of making a fictional story real. Rites and rituals have a place in most institutions, including:

*   **Religion:** Religion is full of rituals, from lighting candles to genuflecting to taking communion. The objects of religious rituals can include candles, beads, clothing, and food.
*   **Military:** Rituals form structure and social order in the military. They include marching, saluting, and keeping uniforms to a specific standard.
*   **Politics:** Rituals in politics include ceremonies like inaugurations. Additionally, a person’s possession of physical symbols such as crowns and thrones represents her authority to rule over the land and population.
*   **Nations:** Nations use rituals to turn the abstract concept of a country into something concrete. The borders, political systems, and identities of countries exist only in your mind and in people’s collective recognition of them. Rituals like raising a nation’s flag and singing the national anthem offer physical representations of the abstract notion of a country.

Rites and rituals don’t necessarily bring you closer to finding truth—in fact, they do the opposite by building your belief in a fiction. However, **rituals create social stability and harmony among the people who participate in them together.**

#### Sacrifice Is a Powerful Ritual

Sacrifice is the most powerful ritual of all, because it involves a form of suffering, which is undeniable. In other words, why would you sacrifice—or suffer—if the reason for your sacrifice weren’t real? **In reality, people sacrifice for fictional reasons all the time, but the false logic is enough to convince believers that their sacrifices prove truth.** Most dogmas and belief systems create ideals that are nearly impossible for people to reach, so sacrifices offer a way for people to prove their faith when they inevitably fall short of their high ideals.

Sacrifice can involve fasting during Ramadan or foregoing meat on Fridays during Lent, both of which are meant to make followers lean on God in their suffering, thereby increasing their faith. **Once you’ve made a difficult sacrifice, you commit to the purpose even more, if for no other reason than to prove that your suffering wasn’t in vain.** This phenomenon is even common in shopping. For example, if you buy an expensive car, you’re likely to gush over it and downplay its shortcomings because you don’t want to believe that you wasted your money.

There are two forms of sacrifice:

1.  Self-sacrifice, or martyrdom: **Making sacrifices not only convinces you of the veracity of your belief, but it also influences people around you.** Someone who knows about your sacrifice is unlikely to question your reasoning because they don’t want to be accused of claiming that you suffered for nothing. Some belief systems have famous stories of historic martyrs, whose legacy convinces future followers to have unwavering faith.
2.  Sacrificing others: Sacrificing others in the name of your beliefs forces you to either be convinced that your beliefs are true, or else admit that you cruelly tortured someone else for no reason.

### _You_ Make Your Life Meaningful

Modern culture places a premium on people’s freedom to maintain multiple identities and subscribe to various meaning-of-life stories. However, liberalism (although it’s going out of style, as we discussed) says that if you evaluate all the different stories, you’ll eventually realize that none of them explains the meaning of life. **These stories don’t give meaning to your life—instead, _you_ assign meaning to your life and experiences.** Religion is only sacred because humans believe it to be. The universe is only mighty and beautiful because humans attach their feelings to it. You don’t need a story to prove that your life is meaningful—it’s meaningful because you give it meaning.

From that standpoint, the liberal story promotes two causes:

1.  **Create meaning** through your emotions, thoughts and desires. Capture these through writing a poem, discovering a new way of performing your job, or exploring your sexuality.
2.  **Fight for the freedom to create.** Tear down barriers to your creativity, including legal, political, social, physical, and biological obstacles.

The freedom to create your identity and assign meaning to your life brings into question the free will that drives your creativity and your fight for freedom. As discussed earlier, science shows that your free will is actually the expression of biochemical signals bouncing between neurons and the regurgitation of social and cultural influences. **While it’s true that you have the free will to _do_ what you want, you don’t have the free will to _decide_ what you want in the first place.** For example, a gay man has the free will to be with another man, but not to choose to be attracted to women.

Some people assume that if you discard the notion of a free will, you’ll sit idly as life happens to you. However, the opposite is true: Once you realize that your thoughts, feelings, and desires don’t define you—they simply reflect your biochemical activity and external influences—then you have the opportunity to explore what _does_ define you. This is a difficult process that forces you to question your internal narrator, because you now know that the narrator is being hacked by advertising and brain signals.

#### Buddhists: Life Has No Meaning

While liberalism tells people that they are responsible for giving meaning to life, Buddhists declare that there is no meaning. **Life simply is what it is, and there’s no purpose in assigning meaning to it.**

Buddhism says that three things are true of life:

1.  Everything changes constantly
2.  Nothing can endure forever
3.  Nothing is totally satisfying

According to Buddhism, human suffering is the result of unrealistic expectations. People hope for things to stay the same, or to last forever, or to completely satisfy them—and, inevitably, those hopes fall flat. By contrast, if people can let go of their attachments to things and their insistence on assigning meaning to everything, they can finally feel peace. As we’ll talk about in the next chapter, meditation reinforces the principle that there is no deeper meaning to life by focusing on simple physical actions and sensations—your exhalation has no deeper meaning than releasing air from your body.

Chapter 20: People Seek the Meaning of Life in Stories

Reflect on how you search for the meaning of life.

Exercise: What’s Your Meaning of Life?

**Lesson:** You must understand your mind in order to make sense of the world, and meditation is one of the best ways to do that.

**In order to understand life, you must understand your own mind, because your mind determines how you experience, interpret, and react to the world around you.** When you understand your mind—including its biases, fears, and complexes—then you can choose your actions more wisely and execute them more effectively. There are many ways to get in tune with your mind, including art, therapy, and physical activity. The author’s method of choice is meditation, which takes your attention away from the noise and distractions of the external world and focuses it on the reality of your breath and bodily sensations. Observing each inhale and exhale keeps your attention on the present reality, which offers a clearer view of life than any story or dogma can.

The better you know your mind, the more you’ll realize that your thoughts and emotions are not as straightforward as you probably think. As we’ve discussed, your thoughts are a reflection of your brain wiring and your external influences. Furthermore, your emotions are a reflection of your physical sensations: External events trigger a physical reaction, and your emotions reflect that physical sensation. For example, if you read a politician’s offensive tweet, the hot feeling in your stomach is your first reaction, and the anger you feel is a reaction to that sensation. Additionally, **when your mind inevitably wanders during your meditation, you learn how little control you actually have over your thoughts—and that realization is the first step in gaining that control.**

### The Mind Is Difficult to Study

While scientists know much about the brain—and ongoing research with new technologies are constantly adding to that database—they know little about the mind. **Whereas the _brain_ is a physical organ with a network of neurons, biochemicals, and synapses, the _mind_ is the source of feelings and subjective experiences**, including love, pleasure, pain, and anger. Experts assume that the experiences of the mind are products of the brain’s activity, but there is no evidence because the mind can’t be studied in a brain scanner.

Currently, there are only two ways to study the mind:

1.  Ask people to report on their subjective experiences, though secondhand accounts are always subject to distortions.
2.  Have researchers observe their own minds, which is difficult to do objectively.

In order to take useful notes of the workings of their own minds, scientists need methodical strategies. **There are few modern methods for self-observation of the mind, so researchers could turn to meditation techniques, which were developed to help people observe their minds and bodies methodically and objectively.**

Increasingly, scientists are studying the brains of experienced meditators—but this approach only goes so far. When researchers scan a meditator’s brain, they gain information about how meditation affects the brain, which is valuable, but they don’t gain any insight about the mind. In order to truly observe the mind, scientists would need to practice meditation themselves. This approach requires time and dedication, because when most people begin meditating, they struggle to concentrate for more than a few seconds at a time. Scientists would have to train for months or years, as astronauts do, to finally be able to collect the data they need.

As for the rest of us, we’d be well advised not to wait for science to take on this task. **If you don’t begin to learn about your own mind**—through meditation or some other means—**then algorithms will soon know your thoughts, fears, and desires better than you do.**

Chapter 21: Understand Your Mind Through Meditation

In a Q&A, the author shares some final thoughts about how to approach the 21st century’s biggest challenges. The key takeaways include:

*   **Of all the stories that humans use to make sense of the world, the two most dangerous are nostalgic fantasies and technological utopias.** Nostalgic fantasies misrepresent the past, and they wrongly imply that the past offers solutions to modern problems. Technological utopias suggest that simply _creating_ new technologies will solve big problems, when the more important question is _how to use_ the technologies.
*   **Believing in the myth of free will makes you vulnerable to manipulation**, because you don’t question the internal and external forces that influence your thoughts and feelings. As we discussed in Chapter 20, discarding the notion of free will enables you to explore the forces that influence you and to discover what truly defines you.
*   If you want to explore your own mind, try art, therapy, or meditation, as we discussed in Chapter 21. Don’t rely on intellectual research and speculation, because **a purely intellectual approach will never help you get to know your mind.**
*   Humans have a basic desire to be understood. In your human relationships, there are many instances when you fail to understand the other person and she fails to understand you. By contrast, as algorithms increasingly get to know your habits and preferences, they’ll understand you better and better. Eventually, you may come home after a bad day and your spouse won’t notice—but your refrigerator will not only acknowledge your bad mood but also offer you comfort food. **Over time, people could become less tolerant of human relationships.**

Despite the huge challenges the world faces in the 21st century, humans have many powerful tools in their collective arsenal. These tools give humankind the power to make things much worse or much better—it all depends upon how we educate ourselves about the issues we face, and how well we can address them as a global civilization.

Final Thoughts

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

There was no way James Clear could have known that an accident as a teenager would lead to his future career. But after learning the power of tiny habits in his life, he decided to share his insights and help others do the same, and it all started with a bat.

When Clear was a sophomore in high school, he dreamed of playing professional baseball. Then, one day, a teammate lost control of a bat he was swinging, and it hit Clear in the face. Clear suffered skull fractures as a result and was placed in an induced coma at the hospital.

After waking up, Clear found that the damage from his injuries had hindered his ability to see and perform certain motor functions. After a year of rehabilitation, Clear was back on the field, but his ability to play baseball was diminished. Still, he wanted to reclaim his dream.

Clear went to a small college, where he was able to walk onto the baseball team. He still wasn’t back to his previous skill level, but instead of partying with his teammates, he started making small changes to help build his strength and confidence. He went to bed early, kept his dorm room tidy, created a daily study routine, and lifted weights several times each week.

As his habits grew, so did his grade point average. He increased his muscle mass and, over the next four years, became one of the top athletes at the school, receiving national attention for his prowess on the field and in the classroom.

There was nothing extraordinary about Clear’s recovery or training that led to his success. Rather, a series of small choices built up over time and allowed him to reach his potential. He became motivated to learn more about the power of habits and studied both cognitive and behavioral sciences. Through this research, he developed a system to guide others in changing their lives and reaching their potential. This system is at the heart of _Atomic Habits_.

### Shortform Note

The original book contains 6 parts with 17 chapters. We’ve condensed further for efficiency of learning:

*   _Part I_ follows the book’s organization with the introduction and first 3 chapters. We cover Clear’s catalytic experiences and the overall framework of atomic habits.
*   _Part II_ groups the 4 stages of habit formation into 4 chapters (corresponding to Chapters 4-17 in the book). Each chapter provides a combined overview of how to understand and approach the individual stages of cue, craving, response, and reward.
*   _Part III_ groups the information from the final section and Appendix in the book to deliver additional tips about creating lasting changes in your life through habits.

Part I | Introduction: The History of Tiny Habits

**The concept behind _Atomic Habits_ relates to 1% improvements in behavior that lead to significant, lasting behavioral transformations**. Often, when we want to change our lives, we get caught up in the belief that major change requires a massive expenditure of time and energy. However, by focusing on the _system_ of behaviors, rather than the _outcome_ of those behaviors, major shifts in who we are and what we do become easy and more sustainable.

### Systems vs. Goals

In every facet of life, there are winners and losers. Whether it’s a game, a job, an award, or an achievement, there are always going to be those who succeed and those who fail. But both winners and losers start with the same goal, so what makes the difference between the two? The answer lies in the priority put on goals and systems.

A goal is the end result you desire. If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal may be to make the Fortune 500 list one day. Systems, on the other hand, are the processes that lead to the result. As an entrepreneur, your system might be to hire a competent staff, launch a major marketing campaign, and form high-profile partnerships. **If your processes are successful, you will eventually attain your desired result.**

If you place your priority on systems, you can avoid the problems associated with prioritizing goals that follow.

**Problem #1: Attaining a goal is a momentary action.**

Doing what is necessary only to achieve a temporary goal is like treating symptoms without addressing the cause of the illness. But goals have an expiration date. When you focus on achieving a goal, what happens when that goal is achieved? Do you set a new goal and go back to square one? Do you lack the motivation to put forth the energy to attain another goal?

Goals are about winning the game. Once the game is won, there is nothing left to do. **Systems are about learning how to play the game so that even after you’ve won, you can keep playing and succeeding.**

For example, you may be tired of living in a messy home. Your goal becomes cleaning your house. You get motivated one day and clean each room until there is no more mess. Your goal is achieved. However, after a week, the mess starts to accumulate and stays that way until you find the same burst of motivation as before, and the cycle continues.

*   If your goal is to live in a cleaner environment, a 1% change in behavior, such as folding discarded clothes on the ground or placing them in the hamper at the end of each day, would slowly become a habit that would lead to the same end result—a less messy home—and be sustainable over time.

**Problem #2: Goals can delay happiness or feelings of satisfaction.**

Goals promote a feeling of failure because it may take a long time to reach them. And if your only path to changing your life is attaining your ultimate goal, you’re delaying personal gratification. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket. If that goal is never accomplished, you never feel happy. **Changes in systems, however, are immediate and reinforce feelings of achievement.**

For example, if you want to publish a novel and focus only on that action, you will only be satisfied when your book is published. The act of writing a book, which requires time and energy, is performed solely for the end result.

However, if your goal is to create a writer’s life or find a better balance between work and writing, the sheer act of changing your behaviors to write each day will feel rewarding.

*   Over time, those daily pages will accumulate into a book, which will serve as proof of your accomplishment in forming better writing habits. You may still want to get published, but the act of finishing a novel will be satisfying, even before submitting it for publication.

**Problem #3: A focus on goals narrows the possible paths to achieve them.**

Think of prioritizing a goal as placing a finish line at the end of a long tunnel. You only see one way forward, or one way to achieve your goal. But if you focus on the systems, the number of possible paths to success becomes immeasurable. You may find that certain processes work better than others and lead to better processes. There are several paths that lead to your desired destination, but if you have tunnel-vision, you’ll miss seeing them.

*   Using the same example, change your mindset from “I have to write this book to get published” to “I want to spend more time writing.” This shift in perspective opens up the possibilities for how your goal can be achieved. The first assumes there is only one path to success; the latter finds success in creating a path that works for you.

When you fail to achieve a goal, the problem does not lie within you. The problem lies within your system. When it comes to habits, **no habit is too big to change as long as you have a good system in place**. **Changing your system leads to inherent, continual, and positive behaviors** that remain even after the goal is achieved.

### The Compounding Effect of Atomic Habits

Small changes in behavior won’t seem significant at first. You must give them time to compound into the notable life changes you want to see.

It’s easy to become frustrated if you look at the immediate results of a new habit as a measure of success. When you’re frustrated, it’s easier to give up or revert back to what’s comfortable or familiar.

If you accept that time is required for any small change to reach an effectual point, **you will not only be able to see the compound effect but also have formed a lasting positive habit that can lead to more improvement and happiness in the future**.

For instance, if you want to save money for a vacation to Hawaii, saving a dollar a day may be the habit you initiate. However, after a week, an increase of $7 saved will seem insignificant, the goal will seem too big, and your efforts will feel futile. At that point, you give up. But after a year of saving a dollar a day, your savings account grows to $365, then $730 after two years, plus all the interest you’ve earned over the two years. You can now afford your trip and have also created a lasting system that will help you continue to save money.

Time becomes a measure of your habits. **With good habits, time works to support your actions and helps you become the person you want to be.** With bad habits, time works against you by keeping you on a bad life trajectory. Let’s look at some examples of habits that compound positively, and some that compound negatively.

#### Positive Habits

**Productivity**—Adding one extra task to your day can lead to big changes in your productivity. As the task is continually performed, it becomes a habit, and habits become automatic. **Automatic habits require little thought, thereby opening up mental space to consider new tasks or behaviors** and increasing your daily productivity.

*   Deciding to make the next day’s to-do list before going to bed might be a small change in your normal routine. But adding this small task to the previous day helps you start your day already organized and clears up time and mental space for something else in the morning.

**Knowledge**—Learning one new piece of information one day will not make you a more-informed person overall, at least not in an obvious way. But **deciding to learn one new thing each day will build up over time into a wealth of knowledge**. Not only are you broadening your scope of knowledge, but new information blends with old information to provide greater insight, thereby continuing to enhance your knowledge base.

*   You want to learn more about investing. If you read one article, you’ll learn more about one small aspect. But if you learn one new piece of knowledge regarding stocks and market prices a day, those pieces will compound into a larger understanding of how investments work. With this knowledge, you’ll have a better grasp how other factors relate to the overall economic system, such as retirement accounts, real estate, and international relations.

**Relationships**—Getting to know one new person will not change your social landscape dramatically. But if you **make a point of getting to know one new person each week, you will slowly build a network of new friends and connections**.

*   If you decide to become better acquainted with one co-worker each week, after a year, you’ll have amassed a network of business connections.

#### Negative Habits

**Stress**—One moment of stress every now and then is common and harmless. But if you **remain in a continued state of stress, it will compound over time and have a negative impact on your overall health**. Also, as you dwell in this negative state, your overall outlook on life will shift until multiple aspects of your day become stress-inducing.

*   If you leave the house late each morning, rush hour traffic becomes that much more stressful as you panic about getting to work on time. Starting each day with this frustration sets you on a negative trajectory from the beginning. From there, other little grievances will begin to frustrate you, and after a while, your entire day is one long frustration. This type of compounded stress five days a week for a whole year can equate to reduced mental and physical health and have lasting consequences.

**Self-Esteem**—Feeling low or bad about yourself one day won’t change your general opinion about who you are. But **frequent thoughts about your lack of worth can build to a point of self-recrimination and poor self-esteem**, which can stifle future self-improvement attempts.

*   If you do poorly on a test, you may feel bad about not taking more time to study properly. Over time, if your study habits don’t change, your continual poor grades will make you feel unintelligent or lacking in the skills required to perform at a high level, which will bleed into other aspects of life.

**Outrage**—One moment of agitation won’t lead you down a path of constant discontent or rage. But if you fail to find better ways of dealing with anger, you will continue to spiral into a volatile state in which any disturbance sends you over the edge.

*   Feeling outraged when you experience discrimination is a natural reaction. But if you allow that outrage to sully your perspective on life or expectations for how you will be treated, your outrage can build to a point where you are quick to argue or, worse, engage in violence.

(Shortform note: We created the preceding examples to illustrate the author’s points.)

### Reaching Your Full Potential

When you understand how compounding habits work and stay committed to change, you can achieve your full potential. A breakthrough moment is when that potential is reached and your goal achieved. From the outside, this breakthrough may seem like an “overnight success.” But your success did not happen overnight. Breakthroughs are only possible if you make it through the _valley of disappointment_ and push through the _plateau of latent potential_.

**The _valley of disappointment_ is the space between what you expect to happen when you change a habit and what actually happens.** Prevailing wisdom deems that progress should be linear—one thing happens that builds to another and another until you reach the top. Therefore, you expect the trajectory of success to move in a straight line at a steady incline.

However, because time is required for small changes to have an effect, there will be a period at the beginning where the line of progress moves horizontally. This horizontal movement is the _plateau of latent potential_. Disappointment occurs in the gap, or valley, created between the assumed trajectory and the realistic plateau because you haven’t seen any signs of improvement yet. But if a small behavior change is successfully continued, the plateau will eventually curve sharply up and continue to ascend.

**All the benefits of your hard work to change your behavior wait on the other side of the plateau of latent potential.** Every habit is a seed that must first be planted for the tree to grow, but the tree will not begin to sprout immediately after being planted. Each day that you continue the new habit and improve by 1% is like adding water to the seed, which nurtures the roots and allows them to embed into the earth. There must be a foundation created underground before the sapling can burst through to the outside.

The period in which you are on the plateau of latent potential is similar to the time needed for the roots to create that foundation. You must stick with a new behavior long enough to get past the plateau and begin your ascent upward.

Chapter 1: It’s More Important to Play the Game than Win

An atomic habit requires fortitude, patience, and a good process for it to grow into a significant and permanent change in your life. Now that you know how small behaviors lead to big habits, how can this information help you achieve your goals?

Exercise: Have You Checked Your Systems Lately?

The process of changing habits is really the process of changing who you are or becoming who you want to be. **Your behaviors must match your sense of self for them to be lasting**, but understanding who you are can be tricky and knowing which behaviors to change even trickier. Once you understand the connection between identity and habits, you’ll find the right path for your life and stick to it.

### The Layers of Change

There are three ways, or layers, in which we think about change. The direction in which we think about them makes all the difference in our success.

**The outer layer consists of outcomes.** As stated, focusing on outcomes to prompt change is the most common approach. You have an end result in sight, so you adjust your behaviors to reach that goal.

**The middle layer consists of processes.** The behaviors involved in your system become the focus of your change. Most habits are associated with this layer.

**The inner layer consists of your identity.** This layer encompasses your opinions, beliefs, and assumptions about yourself and the world. Changes in behavior are motivated by the type of person you are or want to be.

Working from the outside in when striving to change behavior, or outcome-based habits (OBH), focuses your motivation on doing whatever it takes to reach a goal. But those behaviors may not be the most beneficial or capable of being repeated long-term. Further, once the goal is achieved, there is no reason to continue those specific behaviors. **If you adapt your actions to serve one finite purpose, your actions also become finite.**

*   For example, you may decide you want to have six-pack abs. You decide that doing crunches will lead to that outcome. You do 100 crunches a day until you have six-pack abs. Now that you have the abs you want, 100 crunches start to seem like a burden, and you lose motivation to do them because they are not connected with a goal.

The problem with the OBH direction is that it removes the power of beliefs from the equation. Behind every system of behaviors is a set of beliefs. You focused on one action to create your desired outcome, not a system of behavior change that changed who you are as a person. You believe you are someone who can do 100 crunches, but beyond that, who are you? Are you a more fit person? A healthier person? **If your behaviors don’t match the beliefs you feel inside, you will never be able to stick to them.** That is where identity-based habits (IBH) come into play.

The IBH direction means working from the inside out when striving to change behavior. The focus becomes wanting to be a certain type of person, so you behave in a way that type of person likely behaves.

*   Using the six-pack abs example, you determine that someone with six-pack abs must have a healthy lifestyle. Therefore, you desire to become someone with a healthy lifestyle. You decide that a combination of 10 crunches before bed, a low-calorie diet, and riding a bike instead of driving to work equals a healthy lifestyle. Over time, continuing to perform these actions leads to an overall healthier body that includes six-pack abs. Now, you have the abs you wanted and the habit of living more healthily.

One of the best motivators for sticking with new habits is when they are helping you become the person you want to be. **You become motivated not by “I want this result,” but by “I am this person.”** You must be clear about who you are as much as about who you want to be. If you’re not sure who you are, look at your current habits and determine what beliefs support them.

There are two major aspects of IBH that support positive behavior change—_identity evidence_ and _the feedback loop_.

### Evidence of Identity and the Feedback Loop

Identity is not something you’re born with. Your experiences condition your beliefs about your identity. **The more you act a certain way, the more you become conditioned to believe that’s who you are.**

Think of it this way: every action you make is a vote for the type of person you are. As those votes begin to accumulate, you gain a larger picture of your actions and the associated identity. If your house is always messy, you will believe you are a messy person. Your actions become the evidence of your identity, and that can work for you or against you.

**When the evidence suggests a positive view of yourself, you’ll be thrust forward toward positive behaviors.**

*   If you write one page a day for 30 days, the evidence suggests you are a writer. You will continue to write because that’s who you are.

**When the evidence suggests you are someone with bad habits, you will have a hard time believing you are someone who can form good habits.**

*   If you only have two written pages after 30 days because you always watch TV, you will not believe you are a writer and will stop trying.

You must unlearn your long-held beliefs, despite the evidence, to open yourself up to change.

Identity change doesn’t happen overnight. It may take days or weeks for you to start believing you are a different person. **But the more you cast votes for a particular identity through tiny habits, the more you will be motivated to keep casting votes, which will continue to strengthen your identity, and so forth.** This is the **_feedback loop_** and one of the most significant aspects of habit formation.

*   Put another way, the feedback loop signifies the following process: You want to be a certain type of person → that type of person acts in this way → the more you act in this way, the more you become that type of person → the more you feel like that type of person, the more you will act in the appropriate way. This feedback loop acts like a flywheel, gathering momentum as it keeps spinning.

The feedback loop occurs as your habits change to match your chosen identity. But if you behave in a manner opposite to your chosen identity, you will never become that person.

### Two-Steps to Identity Change

You now know that habits represent who you are, but how do you become that person or make sure you are behaving in the right way?

First, **you must decide who you want to be**. What’s important to you? What do you believe in? What do you wish to represent in life? Who would you rather be if not who you are currently?

If you don’t have the answers, **look at the outer layer—outcomes—and work backwards**. For example, you may say, “I want a cleaner home.”

*   Ask, “What sort of things does a person with a clean home do?”
*   Then ask, “If I do these things, what kind of person does that make me?”
*   For instance, a person with a clean home is someone who puts clothes away and does dirty dishes immediately. Someone who does these things is conscientious and vigilant. Therefore, I want to become a conscientious, vigilant person who doesn’t procrastinate.

Second, **prove that you are this new identity with atomic behaviors**. **Now that you have your identity in focus, let the aspects of it drive the feedback loop, not the results.** You may not feel like a conscientious, vigilant person, but the more you act in this way, the more you will start to feel like that person.

*   If you start by simply washing each dish when you’re done with it, your sink will always be clean. When you see your clean sink, you will feel proud of your new habit and look for ways to keep acting. You may want to take the recycling out daily to maintain a clean kitchen. If you’re taking the recycling out, you may see the benefit of taking the garbage out at the same time. You do a sweep of the house for all garbage, which further declutters your space. The longer you live in this new clean space, the more you’ll be motivated to keep it clean.

You can always change who you are if you can discover who you want to be and allow that identity to guide you.

Chapter 2: You Are What You Do

The relationship between identity and habits illuminates many factors that may be getting in the way of change in your life. How can this information help you to create better habits?

Exercise: Are You Happy with You?

**Habits form when the brain processes the four stages of behavior: cue, craving, response, and reward.** The brain is always actively taking in information from the outside world. When you are presented with a situation, the brain runs through a list of options to decide how best to respond. Through a process of trial and error, the brain deciphers which response elicits the best results. **The response that delivers the most satisfaction is the one that will stick.**

Each time you come across a similar situation, you will remember the satisfaction gained from that particular response and repeat it. Therefore, **habits are nothing more than solutions found to manage life’s problems.**

> **The Great Cat Escape**
> 
> In an experiment, cats were placed in boxes and had to press a lever to be let out. This experiment exemplifies how the mind becomes conditioned to a certain response once doing it leads to a positive result.
> 
> At first, the cats sniffed each corner of the box and clawed at the walls. Finally, either by accident or persistence, they found the lever, and one side of the box slid open. The test was repeated with each cat, and each time, the cat found the lever more easily than before.
> 
> Eventually, most cats were able to push the lever immediately after being placed in the box.

### Four Stages of Habit Formation

Once you understand what each stage means and how they link together to create habits, changing your behavior becomes a simpler task.

1.  **Cue**—The cue triggers the brain to recognize an opportunity for a possible reward.
2.  **Craving**—The craving occurs once the cue indicates this opportunity. The craving is the desire to achieve the reward and becomes the motivation to act.
    *   Your desire to achieve the reward stems from your brain’s desire to change some part of your physical or emotional state.
3.  **Response**—The response is the actual action taken. Whether you choose to respond relies on the strength of the craving and how much effort is required to act.
    *   If the action is easy to do, you will do it. If the action is too difficult or requires too much effort, you won’t do it.
4.  **Reward**—The reward is the resulting benefit or satisfaction gained from the response.
    *   All of the other three stages revolve around the reward. The cue notices it, the craving desires it, and the response obtains it.

This process is endless and loops round and round, which is why changing behavior is so difficult. Here’s an example of the stages in action:

*   **Cue:** You sit down to respond to work emails. **Craving:** You begin to feel stressed by the number of emails and want to feel some relief. **Response:** You chew on your nails to relieve the stress. **Reward:** You feel less stressed. **Habit:** You now chew your nails while checking work emails.

These stages can be broken down into the _problem phase_ and _solution phase_ when looking at any habit. The cue and craving create the problem, and the response and reward provide the solution.

*   **Problem phase**—Cue: You walk past a coffee shop on the way to work and smell fresh roasted coffee. Craving: Coffee gives you energy, and you want to feel energized. **Solution phase**—Response: You buy a cup of coffee. Reward: By the time you reach work, you are raring to go. Habit: You buy a cup of coffee each day you walk to work.

To develop a habit, all four stages need to occur. **If any one of the stages fails, the habit will not be formed.**

*   If you remove the cue, your brain is not activated.
*   If you remove the craving, you have no need to act.
*   If the response is too hard, you won’t be able to do it or won’t try.
*   If the reward is not satisfying, you have no reason to want to attain it again.

Cues can be anything in life and often don’t differentiate from person to person. What does differ is the craving.

*   Two people might hear the sound of a slot machine. This is the cue.
*   One is a compulsive gambler and is triggered to crave the rush of gambling. They will find a way to gamble so their emotional craving is appeased, which is the reward.
*   The other person might never gamble, so the cue of slot machines does nothing for them. They crave nothing, so they don’t respond.

**In a world full of cues, learning how to change your cravings or responses to more positive rewards is the first step in gaining control over your behavior.**

#### The Four Laws of Habit Formation

Creating new habits is easier when you understand how to approach the different stages of habit formation. Each stage has an accompanying law that, when followed, promotes positive changes in your life.

1.  Cue—_Make it obvious_.
2.  Craving—_Make it attractive_.
3.  Response—_Make it easy_.
4.  Reward—_Make it satisfying_.

The inverse of these laws help break your bad habits.

1.  Cue—_Make it invisible_.
2.  Craving—_Make it unattractive_.
3.  Response—_Make it difficult_.
4.  Reward—_Make it unsatisfying_.

**With these principles, you can tackle any habit you wish to create or break by making the stages work for you.** The following section will walk you through each law to give you the knowledge needed to do so.

Chapter 3: How Habits Are Formed

Now that you know the stages through which habits are formed, let’s look at some of your current habits to determine how you got them.

Exercise: How Were Your Habits Formed?

Habits can form from cues you aren’t even aware of. You are taking in information even when you don’t realize it. In the world of habits, this means you are reacting to cues and forming habits often without your knowledge. **To be able to form a good habit or break a bad one, you must start with awareness of the habit and the cues that create them.** Therefore, you need to find ways to make your cues and habits obvious.

### The Habit Scorecard

Making a list of your daily activities helps bring your habits out of the unconscious to the surface. A habit scorecard is one way to keep track of the things you do regularly. **Create a list of all the actions you make on a daily basis so your habits are brought into view.**

*   Your scorecard might include the following list: 1. Wake up. 2. Get out of bed. 3. Use the bathroom. 4. Brush teeth. 5. Make coffee. 6. Etc.

Once you’ve filled out your scorecard, determine which habits serve you, hurt you, or neither in the long run. All habits are formed to address some issue or problem in your life, and only you can be the judge of which ones cast votes for the person you want to be. There should be no judgments or criticisms about any particular habit. You are simply mapping the ones that serve you and the ones that don’t. **One way to determine which habits serve you is to think of their net outcomes.**

*   If a habit will compound into a behavior that fits your identity, it is effective.
*   If a habit will compound into a behavior that betrays your identity, it is ineffective.
*   Place a “+” next to effective habits, a “-” next to ineffective habits, and a “=” next to neutral habits.

These steps not only expose your current habits but also see the cues that trigger them.

### Forming New Habits

There are two effective methods that can help you implement better habits into your life using the habit scorecard: _implementation intention_ and _habit stacking_.

#### Implementation Intention

_Implementation intention_ simply means making an advanced plan for what you will do and when you will do it. Research shows that scheduling an action or activity increases the likelihood that it will get done. Therefore, **the two most common cues are time and place.** Implementation intention harnesses the power of both for your benefit.

*   The formula is simple: “When X occurs, I will do Y” or “At X time, I will do Y.”

Trying to create a new behavior arbitrarily requires too much effort. You have to remember what you want to do and become motivated to do it. For instance, you may say, “I will exercise more each day,” and leave it at that. But what sort of exercise will you do? When will it happen? For how long will you do it? When faced with these questions, it is easy to become overwhelmed or indecisive. When you experience these feelings, you are more likely to lose motivation.

Be as specific as possible to help you stay on track. **Rather than saying, “I will exercise more each day,” describe in detail what that means.** Even stating, “I will walk each day,” is too vague. Keep narrowing the action down until it’s clear.

*   Change the statement to, “I will walk for 20 minutes around my block/office building/park at 2 pm.”
*   When 2 pm arrives, your brain will be triggered for the action.

**Specificity removes the need for inspiration or motivation to kick in.** All the decisions have already been made. You just need to perform the intended action.

The point of implementation intention is to address the first law of behavior change. **When you make time and place obvious, you are training your brain to create an association with those cues.** After enough time, the actions will become automatic, thereby forming a new habit.

Some habits are not meant to be daily habits. For desired behavior changes that occur infrequently, try setting the first day of each week, month, or year as your cue. The first day of these time markers tend to feel like a blank slate and inspire optimism, which may help motivate you to act.

#### Habit Stacking

Habit stacking exploits the phenomenon of accumulating behaviors, known as the Diderot Effect, to help create new habits. This effect describes the tendency for one major purchase to lead to another and another. Behaviors follow a similar tendency because no behavior exists in a vacuum. **One action triggers another and so on. Understanding this fact helps you use current habits to build new ones.**

> **The Diderot Effect**
> 
> The Diderot Effect was named after French philosopher Denis Diderot who lived in poverty. One day, Diderot came into a large sum of money after selling his immense library of books.
> 
> After using the money for some essentials, like paying for his daughter’s wedding, Diderot bought a silk robe. The robe stood out among his shabby home, so he started purchasing other fine items to match, which led to more fine purchases until his money was gone.

Rather than planning a new time and location for a new habit, habit stacking links a new behavior to a current one. **The reward of the current habit becomes the cue for the new behavior.**

*   The formula is, “After I do X, I will do Y.”
*   Using the walking example, rather than using 2 pm as the cue, you might use lunch as the cue. “After I finish lunch, I will walk around the block for 20 minutes.”
*   You’re still creating a plan for future action, but this time, you’re linking the new behavior with an obvious behavior.

Habit stacking can also work with routines. Say you have a nightly routine as follows: You finish dinner, wash the dishes, wipe down the counters, and set the coffeemaker for the morning. If your desired identity is someone who eats healthier foods, you might implement a habit that supports that identity. Your routine might become: You finish dinner, wash the dishes, wipe down the counters, place a bowl, spoon, and box of cereal next to the coffeemaker, and set the coffeemaker for the morning.

The example of laying out the bowl, spoon, and cereal highlights an important aspect of habit stacking. **The cues you wish to create must make sense for the habit to be triggered** and the follow-through to be successful. You must take into account which habits fit into which routines and when.

*   If you lay out your bowl and spoon before you wipe down the counters, you will be forced to move them, which may become an annoyance and hinder the action.
*   If you decide to walk for 20 minutes after you finish lunch but only have a 30-minute lunch break, you’ll never successfully perform the behavior, and the habit will not form.
*   If you want to start a daily habit but pair it with an infrequent habit, you will not create a proper cue for the behavior.

As with implementation intention, make the behavior you will stack and the behavior upon which it will be stacked as specific as possible to create the highest level of success.

*   “Write more” and “eat healthy” are goals with ambiguous systems. Likewise, “before dinner” is an ambiguous cue.
*   Instead, say “After changing out of my work clothes, I will write for 30 minutes.”
*   **This attention to detail makes the cue and plan for action obvious.**

### Habits and Your Environment

The way your environment is designed and utilized has a major impact on your behaviors. We are constantly influenced by environmental factors without realizing it. For instance, when we walk into a quiet room, like a church, we automatically whisper. **Environment shapes behavior, which makes habits more dependent on context than we know.**

The previous example of setting out items for cereal signifies another important aspect in behavior change—the power of sight. Of the nearly eleven million receptors in the body, sight uses 90% of them. Therefore, visual cues are the biggest instigators for action.

*   For example, at the grocery store, you are more likely to buy items at eye level than those on the bottom shelf.

These types of choices are not due to thought or motivation but because they are more convenient.

In your own life, your habits center around what you see and what appears convenient. To form and maintain good habits, **ensure** **that the right visual cues exist in your environment**. You become the architect of your behavior when you design your environment to support obvious cues.

One way to organize your environment for success is to learn the context embedded in a cue. Objects in and of themselves are not cues alone. **Your relationship with the object—the context by which you understand the object—is the trigger.**

At first, all cues will be specific, but over time, the associated behavior will become linked to the general context of the cue.

*   You may have a glass of wine when you go out to dinner with friends. Over time, being with your friends becomes the trigger, not the specific action of eating at a restaurant. Now, anytime you are with friends, you will crave a glass of wine, even if you’re at home.

Different cues develop different contexts for every person.

*   You might associate your couch with relaxing and watching movies, whereas someone else sees their couch as a place to read.
*   If you want to form the habit of reading more, make the cue obvious by mixing a visual cue with a new context.
*   (Shortform example: Before you leave for work, place a book on the couch cushion. When you come home from work, the book will be waiting, and over time, the context of the couch will become associated with reading.)

Your unique relationship with objects is useful in training your brain to view a particular part of your environment in a particular context. To create better habits, **ensure that each object or space is only associated with one context.** When contexts overlap, it’s easier for the easiest action to win out.

*   If you have trouble sleeping but always look at your phone while lying in bed, remove the context of checking social media or texting in bed. Use the bed only when it’s time to sleep.
*   By removing all other activities from the bed, you will create a relationship between the bed and sleep. When you lay down each night, your brain will be triggered to respond with sleep.

It’s always easier to form a new habit in a new environment because you’re not fighting old cues. However, if you are not able to change environments, redefine or rearrange yours to create different associations. Create zones for different behaviors, such as only eating at the table or only working at your desk.

**The more you can create a stable and predictable environment with clear contextual cues, the more stable and predictable your behaviors will be.**

#### Remove the Cue to Break Habits

The inverse of the first law—make it obvious—is _make it invisible_. **If you want to quit a bad habit, you must remove the cues.**

Despite what you’ve been conditioned to believe, discipline and self-control are not the most important aspects of habit formation. You can break bad habits, but you won’t forget them or their cues. Once a habit is ingrained in the brain, the craving that triggers it will automatically kick in whenever the cue resurfaces.

Willpower is a temporary solution; changing your environment is a long-term solution. **When you create a predictable and stable environment, the need for discipline or willpower is reduced.**

*   For instance, if you stay up too late watching TV in bed, remove the TV from the bedroom.

Reducing exposure to a bad cue is like cutting off the fuel supply to the engine driving the habit. You’ll always remember how to drive, but you won’t be able to start the car.

##### Bad Habits Can Be Cues

Bad habits often create the cues that trigger behavior. The habit creates a new sensation that triggers the same craving. This trap is known as “cue-induced wanting.”

*   When you feel anxious, you smoke a cigarette. Smoking makes you concerned about your health, which makes you anxious, so you reach for another smoke.
*   You feel lethargic, so you watch television. Watching television makes you feel unproductive, which makes you more lethargic, so you watch more television.

Create a more positive environment to reduce your vulnerability to this detrimental cycle.

Part II: Applying the Framework ︱ Chapter 4: Making Cues More Obvious

Now that you understand how to make cues more obvious, how can you use this knowledge to start new behaviors in your life?

Exercise: Timing Is Everything

You’ve learned that sight is the most powerful cue, so how can this information help you create and break habits?

Exercise: Shaping Your Visual Environment

Cravings are the brain’s way of signifying that something is missing inside. **Your habits are the time-tested strategies used to create shifts in your physical or emotional state to fill the void.** There are many ways to address satisfying either of these states, but you will use the one that satisfies them in the most pleasurable way. To ensure you are motivated to act in a positive way, you must make the right behavior a more attractive option for satisfying your craving. But first, you must understand where cravings come from and why they are so powerful.

### Historical Relevance

Many of your current cravings are grounded in your ancestry. Humans have evolved significantly since the time of hunters and gatherers. Science and technology have increased your ability to live more efficiently and find a wealth of resources to address your needs. However, what hasn't changed are the underlying motivations that influence behaviors. **Every behavior stems from some type of underlying motive**. Your habits are contemporary solutions to address ancient motivations, which include the following:

*   The need to survive, reserve or build strength, find companionship, be accepted by the tribe, belong, or achieve prestige and admiration.

> **The Motivation for Overeating**
> 
> Our ancestors lived in a time where food was not plentiful, and calorie- and nutrient-rich food sources were scarce. The practical strategy was to find whatever food they could forage and eat as much as possible to survive.
> 
> In modern times, food is abundant in many regions of the world. Foods that are high in calories are no longer scarce. We no longer have to gorge ourselves to survive, and we have the added benefit of knowing that high-calorie foods are not good for us.
> 
> Still, because of this ingrained motivation, we crave unhealthy foods and consume them in mass quantities.

Businesses monopolize on these ancient motivations to sell more products or make more money. For example, the food industry capitalizes on your motivation to survive by making food more attractive and habit forming.

*   Natural, unprocessed food varies little from bite to bite. When the novelty of the sensation these foods provide wears off, the brain becomes bored and determines the body is full.
*   Processed food can be manipulated to ensure that boredom is never reached. Chemicals enhance flavors and textures, creating dynamic combinations that are pleasing to the mouth and make each bite pleasurable, which excites the brain and keeps you eating.

Other examples include how social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, capitalize on your inherent need for community and recognition, and dating apps capitalize on your need for companionship.

You are always looking for ways to satiate these inherent motivations, and **the more attractive and stimulating the experience is, the more you will crave it**.

### Scientific Relevance

All habits create a dopamine spike in the brain. Dopamine is a brain chemical produced when you anticipate pleasure and creates the sensation of desire. Dopamine is also released when you experience pleasure. These two experiences can be considered as _wanting_ versus _liking_.

The anticipation of pleasure—the process of wanting—is triggered when the brain notices a cue and perceives a reward. At this moment, dopamine spikes and motivates you to act. A similar thing happens when you receive a reward. When something happens that is pleasurable—the act of liking—dopamine spikes to indicate your satisfaction. The only difference is that **the system involved in both wanting and liking is wired to be ten times stronger for wanting**.

*   Consider how much more exciting the days leading up to Christmas were than actual Christmas morning as a child.
*   Consider the butterflies felt before a date compared with how it feels to be on the date.

In relation to the stages of habit formation, your body releases dopamine in the following way:

*   Reward—The first time you receive a reward, dopamine spikes, indicating your pleasure.
*   Cue and Craving—When the same cue is noticed again, dopamine spikes and initiates a craving in anticipation of the reward.
*   Response—The anticipation urges you to act, and dopamine remains at a neutral level.
*   Reward—When you receive the reward the second time, dopamine does not spike, but stays neutral. This is because the reward was expected and the pleasure experienced less satisfying than anticipated.
    *   If the reward is not received, dopamine drops from the disappointment.
    *   If the reward comes later than expected, dopamine drops from the disappointment, then spikes at the relief of finally receiving the reward again.

(Shortform example: The habit formation stages can be seen clearly in drug addiction. The phrase “chasing the dragon” characterizes the difference between wanting and liking. The first time the drug is used and elicits a pleasing sensation, a connection is formed between the drug and pleasure. Each time you are cued to want the same type of pleasure, you will crave the drug. Dopamine spikes in anticipation of the same high as before, but because anticipation now overrides actual pleasure, the result will be less than before. Continuing to chase this high is the essence of habit formation.)

### Social Relevance

Your underlying motivation to belong affects your behaviors. Group mentality is strong in society. You want to feel connected to others and a part of something larger than yourself. Therefore, what you see others do around you shapes what you do. Your earliest habits are formed by imitating how parents, friends, and teachers behave. **When certain behaviors help you fit in and belong, they are more attractive.**

There are three groups of people that greatly influence your choices in behavior.

#### The Close

You often pick up habits from those you are close to without realizing it. Like the physical environment, your social environments are riddled with various cues. **The manner in which your loved ones respond to a cue acts as a sort of subconscious peer pressure.** You imitate their behavior so you will be seen as one of them. This type of imitation is only negative when you’re surrounded by bad influences.

*   If your best friends smoke cigarettes, you will be more likely to start smoking.
*   If your family members overeat, you become more susceptible to overeating.

Surrounding yourself with positive influences helps surround you with good behaviors. When you see others behaving in a way that is in line with the habits you want to create, forming those habits becomes easier. To use your social environment to its full potential, **seek out specific social groups where your desired behaviors are the norm** and with which you already share something in common.

*   If you want to read more, join a book club. Even better, join a book club made up of similar people, such as those with similar careers or who are at similar stages in life.
*   If you have a young child and want to exercise more, join a mommy/daddy and me yoga club.

**The shared identity promotes your personal identity, and the sense of belonging fuels your motivation to maintain good habits** and provides allies for the journey.

#### The Many

Group mentality is a powerful influencer because it is easier to go along with bad or incorrect behaviors than be good or right on your own. When you don’t know how to respond in certain situations, you scan the people around you to see what everyone else is doing.

*   When you want to buy a new appliance or piece of technology, you check Amazon reviews.
*   When you want to see a movie, you look at Rotten Tomatoes to see what the critics thought.
*   When you want to go to a restaurant, you check Yelp to see which establishments others liked.
*   **You want to imitate the best behaviors, so you seek out the most popular options chosen by the public.**

Your natural instinct is to get along with others, but when the actions of the group cause you to disregard your own feelings or behaviors that fit your desired identity, this influence becomes negative. Following a different path than the group is unattractive, but with effort, you can learn to stick to your guns and seek out groups who support your identity.

#### The Powerful

Your underlying motivation to gain status and admiration for who you are causes you to imitate the behaviors of successful people. **You imitate those you envy and become motivated to act in a way that generates the praise and respect you perceive them to have.** You believe doing what powerful people do will garner the same results in your life. You also avoid behaviors that may reduce your status in society.

The reward you seek is acknowledgement for who you are and what you do, and you will continue to bounce between behaviors until you find the right one that works. Find the right role models with positive attributes and actions to help motivate you to form good habits.

### How to Make the Right Behaviors Attractive

There are many different ways to address the underlying motivations of behavior, and your current methods may not be the best ones. The habits you have now are merely the behaviors the brain latched onto because of dopamine stimulation when rewards were experienced. **To make behaviors more attractive and create new cravings, you can manipulate your thoughts and actions**.

#### Supernormal Stimuli and Temptation Bundling

The more attractive and stimulating an experience, the more you will crave it. Unfortunately, many healthy new habits (like exercising or eating more vegetables) don’t trigger strong cravings. The solution to this is to **bundle the new habit with something you already want**. This is called **temptation bundling**.

Temptation bundling creates a supernormal stimuli—a heightened version of reality that elicits stronger-than-normal responses.

*   For example, an engineer loved binge-watching Netflix but also knew he should get more exercise. He used his knowledge to manipulate the functions of a stationary bike and the Netflix app. In order to watch Netflix, he had to ride the bike and keep a certain pace. If the pace decreased, the streaming stopped.
*   By creating a connection between his craving to watch Netflix with his desire to exercise more, he made the act of exercising more attractive.

Temptation bundling can also be used with habit stacking. The formula is as follows: “After X \[current habit\], I will do Y \[new habit\]. After I do Y, I get to do Z \[craved habit\].”

*   You’ve already stacked your need to exercise more on top of your current habit of eating lunch. But you also want to play video games. Your formula changes from: “After I finish lunch, I will walk around the block for 20 minutes” to “After I finish lunch, I will walk around the block for 20 minutes. After I walk around the block for 20 minutes, I get to play video games for 30 minutes.”
*   If playing video games becomes the reward for walking, you’ve created a supernormal stimulus by making exercise more rewarding. You’ll begin to crave the walk so you can claim your reward afterward.

If the habit you stacked previously is something you’re passionate about, you can bundle another needed habit in between the two previous habits.

*   You were successful in starting the habit of drawing more because you stacked it on top of washing dishes, but you also have bills to pay. Your formula changes from, “After I wash the dishes, I will draw for an hour” to “After I wash the dishes, I will pay the bills. After I pay the bills, I get to draw for an hour.”

**Through temptation bundling, you create a heightened version of your desired habit to elicit a stronger desire.** Over time, you will look forward to performing the needed habit because it means you get to do the desired activity next.

#### Signal Switching

When you experience positive feelings about something or someone, that thing or person becomes more attractive. Since cravings are nothing more than a signal to change part of your physical or emotional state, you can switch the signal by connecting behaviors to positive feelings. If behaviors create positive feelings, they become more attractive.

**1\. A shift in paradigm is one way to generate more positive feelings.** Think about your “to-do” list. The items on it likely feel like burdens, or things you _have_ to do. Change the title of the list to **“_get_\-to-do”** list, and the burden of performing these acts now feels like an opportunity and a privilege.

*   “I have to pick up my child from school” becomes “I get to pick up my child from school.” This small shift helps you recognize your fortune in having the freedom to be there for your child in this way.
*   “I have to shop for groceries” becomes “I get to shop for groceries.” This different way of thinking about it highlights your fortunate position in being able to afford groceries and having the time to shop.

**2\. Redefining habits to highlight their advantages, rather than disadvantages, also creates more positive feelings.**

*   Exercise is typically thought of as strenuous and exhausting, but you could also think of it as strengthening and enhancing. “I need to exercise” becomes “Time to build muscle and endurance.”
*   Saving money is often experienced as a sacrifice, but you could experience it as an act of liberation. Living frugally now helps you live more comfortably in the future.
*   Meditation can leave you feeling the opposite of calm if you struggle to keep your mind clear. Instead of feeling frustrated with the intruding thoughts, see them as an opportunity to continue practicing and improving your ability to focus.
*   Nerves can cause anxiety and an increased heart rate, which can feel stifling and hinder your behavior. Rather than experiencing nerves negatively, experience them as excitement and boosting your adrenaline.

**3\. Motivational rituals can also become cues to trigger positive feelings.**

*   If you listen to the same song every time you are intimate with your partner, after a while, that song will elicit feelings of intimacy and trigger you to act.
*   Using the same warm-up regimen before athletic competitions will put you in the right frame of mind to compete.
*   If scratching your dog behind the ears calms you down, attach other behaviors to the act to help you create that sensation at other times. For instance, take two deep breaths and smile before you pet your dog. In the future, when you want to feel calm, you can take two deep breaths and smile to trigger the brain to respond with calming feelings.

Creating more positive feelings for your habits will not happen overnight. Determine which strategy will work best and stick to it. **Small changes require time to fully engage with the mind and become automatic cravings for the appropriate actions.**

Chapter 5: Making Cravings More Attractive

Who you associate with and where you live play big roles in the behaviors you perform. Do your social circle and environment help motivate you to be the person you want to be?

Exercise: Does Your Community Support Your Identity?

You’ve learned that the way you think about your life can influence your motivation for life. How can you use temptation bundling and signal switching to improve your behaviors?

Exercise: Mind Over Matter

Now that you understand how to create more positive cues and cravings, the time to act is upon you. The law governing the third stage of habit formation is to make the response easy. But making a habit easy doesn’t mean doing easy things. **Making habits easy means creating pathways for behavior that are low in friction and high in follow-through.** So, what does it mean to act, and how are these pathways created?

### Motion versus Action

Preparing for change is an effective way to trick yourself into thinking you’re forming better habits when all you’re really doing is procrastinating. You research the latest diet trends, seek out the best get-rich-quick scheme, or look for the most optimal side hustle. **When you get trapped in the process of looking for the best solution, you never move beyond the act of looking to actual action.**

_Motion_ is what happens when you take time to plan, research, and design the process of changing. When working for you, motion helps you gather your thoughts and determine what your first steps will be to change your system. When working against you, motion gives you the illusion of making progress. You feel the forward movement of action without taking any of the risks of actually acting.

A persistent tendency to merely prepare for action becomes a bad habit over time. You notice a cue, crave the reward, and respond by planning the action. You feel productive, but motion doesn't lead to the result you _really_ want.

**_Action_, on the other hand, is actual forward motion.** Without action, your goals will never be attained. You can rationalize planning as your desire to determine the perfect behavior for change, but a perfect system isn’t what creates good habits. Repetition is. Only by getting reps of a desired habit in will you be able to create behavior that becomes easy and sustainable.

> **The Varying Results of Motion and Action**
> 
> Notice the difference between the two processes and the end result of each.
> 
> *   Outlining 30 ideas for a short story generates a list of ideas.
>     
> *   Choosing one idea and writing 30 words a day will generate a short story over time.
>     
> 
> *   Reading blogs about weight loss and diet trends generates information about eating healthy.
>     
> *   Eating a salad for lunch three times a week generates a habit of eating more healthy foods.
>     
> 
> You can plan endlessly and never get anywhere. The only way for results to be generated is by beginning the desired behavior, whether it’s perfectly planned or not.

### Repetition Is Key

**The question you should ask when attempting behavior change is not _how_ _much time_ will it take, but _how_ _many times_ will it take.** Hebb’s Law, named after the 1949 neuropsychologist Donald Hebbs, states that “neurons that fire together wire together.” The brain is a muscle, and like all muscles, when parts of it are used frequently, they enlarge, grow strong, and become more effective. If certain parts go unused, the effectiveness of those parts reduces and they eventually atrophy. For this reason, repetition is at the key to forming a habit.

Neuroscientists use the term “long-term potentiation” to describe the process of automating habits. In the brain, neural pathways are created when a new behavior begins. **The more the brain recognizes a pattern of behavior, the deeper the pathways become.** With each repetition, the pathway strengthens and the action becomes fine-tuned and automatic.

The goal of habit formation is to strengthen the connections in your brain to reach a state of automaticity, or the ability to perform an action without thinking about each step. Because every habit must go through this process, **the frequency with which you perform a habit is more important than the length of time you perform it**.

Your current habits were formed from hundreds to millions of repetitions. Whether the repetitions occurred over years, months, or days is less significant. To create new habits, you must practice with the same rate of frequency. Every attempt to perform the new habit gets you closer to the habit line of automaticity, when it becomes ingrained in the brain.

### The Path of Least Resistance

Since repetition is required for habit formation, making sure you get your reps in is vital. **You will practice a behavior more often if it is considered easy.** A behavior is deemed easy if the amount of effort required to perform it is low.

Energy is a precious commodity, and humans are hard-wired to conserve it. When provided with two choices that are similar in result and action, whichever requires the least amount of effort will win out. You are always looking to get the most value with the least amount of energy expended.

#### Motivation versus Convenience

Many self-help books promote motivation as the main ingredient for sticking with any new habit. If you want to change bad enough, you will. But people are more likely to do what is convenient, even when motivated.

*   For example, you may feel motivated to go for a jog, but if you’re already in your pajamas, it is more convenient to stay cozy and watch TV than change clothes and start a new activity.

**The more inconvenient a behavior is, the less likely you are to do it.** Check your habit scorecard to see how many of your daily activities are driven by motivation and how many are driven by convenience.

*   Checking social media and watching TV are incredibly convenient activities.
*   Washing dishes after you use them is more convenient than waiting until they pile up.

Habits are really just obstacles to becoming the person you want to be. You want the identity, not the habit; therefore, **the more convenient the habit, the more easily you can become the person you want to be.** This is why you can’t trust motivation alone to start new behaviors.

There will always be days when you’re not motivated to act but you still need to get your behavior reps in. Only by reducing the effort required to act will you ensure you will still follow through. The amount of effort relates to the amount of friction existing between you and the act.

*   Friction is like a kink in a hose. You can still push water through, but the effort to get water to come out is greater than if you simply removed the kink before sending water through.

By removing the friction from habits, they will become easier to maintain, even when you’re unmotivated.

#### Getting Rid of Friction

You already learned how to design your environment to create more obvious cues. Now, you will learn how to design your environment to make responding to those cues easier.

Businesses make millions of dollars by making their products accessible, thereby more habit forming.

*   Texting is less cumbersome than emailing or writing a letter.
*   Meal delivery services make it easy to make dinner without the effort required to go to the grocery store or decide what you will eat.

You can create this same type of ease in your life by resetting your environment for success. **Resetting the environment means cleaning up after your last action in a way that prepares you for future actions.** Examples include placing the remote back on the TV stand when finished watching so you can find it easily or throwing trash away whenever you leave your car.

When things are in the right place, not only is finding them or maintaining the associated environment easier, but it also saves time and effort later, which can be transferred to other activities. A little effort toward organization in the beginning creates easy paths to good habits.

*   Consider the cereal items set out as a cue to eat healthier. Setting up this cue translates into an easy action of eating cereal because you’ve removed three steps in the process of making a bowl of cereal.
*   When you eat the cereal, wash the bowl and spoon, and set them out again, you’re making the action easy again for the next day, which helps to strengthen the neural pathway for that habit.

> **Inversion: Make It Difficult**
> 
> Because you are wired to always look for the path of least resistance, it doesn’t take much friction to turn you off from a bad habit.
> 
> If you want to reduce how much television you watch, unplug the TV or take the batteries out of the remote. Watching television is not as easy if you have to go through several steps to make it happen.
> 
> If you want to focus more during work or avoid distractions while reading, leave your phone in a different room. The effort required to get up and seek out the phone is enough to keep you in place and focused on what you’re doing.
> 
> The cumulative effect of increasing friction in small ways is immense over time.

### Decisive Moments

As previously stated, behaviors don’t happen in a vacuum. One automatic habit leads to another and so on. Think of each habit as a piece of railroad track. In succession, your pieces of track add up to a long railway. Depending on the first track you laid down, you could end up at the right destination or one far from where you wanted to go.

The first habit that sets the influence train in motion is called the _decisive moment_. These are small choices that snowball into future behavior. **From this one decision, you create a set of options that your future self will have to choose from.** You become limited in behavior because of the path your decisive moment laid out. In this way, your habits become the entry for behavior, not the end point.

**It’s easier to stay on a course of linked actions than stop and shift directions at some point down the line.** There are three ways to ensure your decisive moments create positive paths: the two-minute rule, commitment devices, and one-time actions.

#### Two-Minute Rule

One of the biggest ways you can fail at forming a new habit before you begin is by starting too big. **If you break the system of a new habit down into smaller pieces, you will have more success in maintaining that habit.** When the first step is easy, it’s more likely your decisive moment will be a positive one that snowballs into more positive behaviors in the near and distant future.

Committing to two minutes of activity is easier than trying to surmount the whole activity at once. Once you determine what actions are required in your system to reach your goal, rate them from easiest to hardest and commit to performing the easiest for two minutes.

*   “I will read more” becomes “I’ll read one page a day.”
*   “I will walk for 20 minutes” becomes “I will put on my walking shoes.”
*   “I will do the laundry” becomes “I will put the dirty clothes in a basket.”

A new habit should be easy, so do the easy part first. What follows might be difficult or challenging, but **once momentum is built with the gateway habit, you are more likely to keep going**.

Let’s say your end goal is to run a marathon. This goal encompasses the identity of someone who runs. The habit you wish to form is to run more often. You break your system into separate steps, but if you make the error of starting too big, your actions may look like the following:

*   Step 1: Run for 20 minutes after returning home from work every day.
*   Step 2: Increase running time by 10 minutes every week.
*   You succeed in running for 20 minutes for two days in a row, but by Day 3, you’re too tired and don’t feel like running. On Day 4, you feel guilty for not running the day before, which makes you feel lazy, so you don’t run again.

Starting with a big step like running every day was hard to maintain because it required effort, and the moment that effort outweighed your motivation, you stopped. However, **breaking down the system into two-minute increments will help you keep casting votes for your desired identity without a massive requirement of effort**.

*   Step 1: Change into running clothes when you get home.
*   Step 2: Put on running shoes.
*   Step 3: Walk to the sidewalk.
*   Step 4: Jog for two minutes.

You may not be able to motivate yourself for a full run, but you can surely motivate yourself enough to change clothes. That may be as far as you get that day, but you’ve triggered the brain to start forming a pathway toward your future goal by getting into the habit of changing into jogging clothes after work. Over time, putting on workout clothes becomes a ritual, which serves as a cue for the larger response of going for a run. With continued repetition, the snowball effect will take hold, and you will continue taking the necessary steps until you are in shape for your marathon.

(Shortform note: You can go one step further by reducing the friction of Step 1. If you lay your running clothes out before leaving for work, the effort required to put them on is reduced.)

The point of the two-minute rule is not to only do the easiest thing. **The point is to make a habit of showing up for your desired goal and identity.** The biggest enemy to progress is the anticipation of work. **The two-minute rule keeps you below the threshold of effort, which allows you to keep succeeding in accomplishing the task.** As you generate enough days of performing the two-minute step, your identity as the person you want to be strengthens, which motivates you to keep moving forward, two minutes at a time.

If the two-minute rule seems gimmicky or foolish, try restricting your behaviors to two minutes, instead of allowing the two minutes to snowball into more.

*   You are only allowed to run for two minutes before you have to go home.
*   After enough reps, you start to feel like you want to do more, but you are required to stop.
*   You will now become the champion of running for longer periods of time when you begin to feel dissatisfied with your two-minute restriction.

#### Commitment Devices

**Commitment devices are actions taken to ensure your decisive moments lead to the right future behavior.**

A famous example of a commitment device is the one Victor Hugo used when faced with a deadline for his new novel. Having a year initially to complete his book, Hugo spent most of the time socializing or traveling out of the home. When his publisher threatened to cancel his contract if the book wasn’t submitted in the next six months, Hugo did something to ensure he would work on his book. He had his assistant lock all of his clothes in a chest and keep the key. The only thing he had to wear was a shawl. With no clothes, Hugo was forced to stay home. Six months later, he submitted the manuscript for _The_ _Hunchback of Notre Dame_.

This type of commitment device is extreme, but it demonstrates how removing the elements that cause bad habits from your day sets you up for positive options.

*   Instead of buying bulk-quantity snacks, buy individually packaged servings of snacks to curb overeating.
*   Have the server at a restaurant box half your meal before he brings it to the table to ensure you only eat the amount you want.
*   Set a timer that shuts down electronics or the WiFi connection so it’s impossible to stay up late using them.

When you take actions in the present that dictate desired actions in the future, you abide by your desired habits before you even attempt them. **The key of a commitment device is to make _not_ doing the good habit harder than it is to do it.** This is the inverse of the third law—make bad habits impossible.

#### One-Time Actions

A one-time action is a significant effort made once that translates into making bad habits impossible and good ones inevitable. Some simple examples include:

*   swapping smaller plates for your current large plates to maintain small portion sizes
*   buying personally tailored support shoes to ease muscle strain and pain
*   moving to a supportive community where your desired identity is the norm.

An easy way to make significant, life-altering one-time decisions is with the use of technology. These days, you can do just about anything with technology, so why wouldn’t you use it to your advantage to help you achieve your goals?

*   You can automate a transfer of money from your checking account to a savings account daily or weekly.
*   You can set-up automatic bill paying systems to ensure you always pay on time.
*   You can wire your home with systems that can be timed to restrict access to certain parts of the home or activities.
*   You can block access to certain websites, like social media or video games.

**When everything in your life that can be automated is, good habits require no energy at all**, which frees up time for other activities. Use technology to enhance your lifestyle to keep you moving in the right direction and stop you from slipping into bad habits.

However, technology also makes life more convenient, which has the opposite effect of automating bad habits and falling victim to temptation.

*   Streaming services make binge watching convenient by automatically starting the next episode.
*   Social media is easy to use and always available to turn to with a click of a button when you’re bored.

Make sure technology is working to promote good behaviors and not make bad ones more visible and accessible.

Chapter 6: Simplify Your Responses

Trying to tackle a new habit all at once can lead to disappointment and reduced activity. How can you incorporate the two-minute rule into your desired habits to help you stay motivated?

Exercise: The Two-Minute Tango

Both commitment devices and one-time actions require foresight to keep you moving in the right direction. What are some ways these strategies can help improve your habits?

Exercise: Making a Big Commitment

The cardinal rule of habits is “what is rewarded is repeated; what is punished is avoided.” So far, you’ve learned the necessary steps to help motivate you to begin a new habit or break a bad one. The first three stages of habit formation—cue, craving, and response—all work to help you create a new behavior. **The final stage—reward—helps you duplicate the behavior.**

All habits are based on anticipated pleasure because pleasure triggers the brain to remember what happened to create it. Satisfaction is the final link in the habit loop, which is why the fourth law of habit formation is “make it satisfying.” However, **for satisfaction to impact behavior, the sensation must be experienced _immediately_**.

### Instant versus Delayed Rewards

Modern society is structured as a “delayed-return environment,” in which the rewards for many actions come at a later point in the future.

*   Only after weeks of work do you receive payment for your services.
*   Only after a steady routine of exercise and healthy eating do changes in your body become noticable.

However, human nature is embedded in an “immediate-return environment” inherited from early humans and the animal kingdom, where survival and goals were daily concerns. Despite the changes to society, humans still value instant gratification over future gratification.

As far as habits are concerned, this tendency can work against or for you. Each behavior encompasses several outcome stages. With bad behaviors, the present outcome is positive, as bad habits serve some immediate purpose in your life.

*   Smoking reduces anxiety.
*   Social media reduces boredom.

However, the cumulative outcome of bad behaviors is negative.

*   Smoking leads to poor health and medical issues.
*   Social media leads to loss of time or anxiety.

Likewise, with good behaviors, the present outcome is less gratifying, but the eventual outcome is positive. In other words, **you pay for a good habit now and pay for a bad habit later**.

Because of delayed gratification with good behaviors, the best laid plans often go awry. Deciding to change your life empowers you toward positive action. But when the time comes to act, the temptation to do what provides the most immediate gratification often thwarts the process. Thus, the more you experience instantaneous pleasure, the more you should check the behavior that causes it.

Success in any aspect of life usually requires less attention on immediate gratification. Especially when forming habits, the focus typically is on sacrifice. To mitigate the strain of sacrifice, **you must find a way to link small bits of satisfaction to positive behaviors**. In essence, you are making human nature work in your favor.

You remember the ending of behavior more than the process, which makes the ending significant in habit formation. Like habit stacking to create a link between the reward of a current habit and a cue for a new habit, you can create a link between the ending of one habit and an immediate reward. These links between habits and rewards are called _reinforcements_.

#### Reinforcements

**Reinforcements help maintain continued behavior by allowing you to experience a win after a certain action.** They are especially useful when a habit does not encompass tangible action, or _habits of avoidance_.

Habits of avoidance include things like not drinking alcohol for a month and not spending money on unnecessary items. The habit is one of simply not doing something you don’t want to do, so there is no real element of action that creates a sense of progress. Use reinforcements with these habits to make the behavior more satisfying.

*   For example, each time you pass up buying an unnecessary item, you can transfer the money to a special account earmarked for something you want, like a vacation or leather boots.
*   The satisfaction of watching your vacation or boot fund grow reduces the feelings of sacrifice in not buying something you don’t need.

Importantly, **the reward must align with your desired identity**. For instance, if your desire is to become a more frugal person, saving money for a pair of expensive boots likely doesn’t align well with the habits of a frugal person. In this case, the reward for not making an unnecessary purchase might be an afternoon at the beach or an extra long lunch break. These rewards support the identity of someone who has more freedom because they are financially stable.

**As the small rewards help you maintain a desired habit, your chosen identity will build.** Eventually, the identity will become the thing that reinforces the behavior because it feels good to do something that supports who you are or want to be. That satisfaction will make outside encouragement less important over time. Incentives help form habits. Identity makes habits inherent.

#### Habit Tracking

Another way to create satisfaction is by tracking or measuring your progress with a certain habit. **When you visually track progress, the success of your habit becomes tangible and reinforces the behavior.**

There are many ways to track habits: use objects to represent each completion of the habit, mark days on a calendar, or journal progress. Many successful people employ some form of habit tracking.

*   One successful businessman created a large list of clients by transferring a paper clip from one jar to another after each sales call. He didn’t stop until all the paper clips were transferred. The next day, he’d start again. This visual representative object allowed him to see the progress he made each day and kept him motivated to keep making calls.
*   Benjamin Franklin carried a journal with a list of virtues he wished to live by. At the end of each day, he wrote down his progress in either upholding or failing to uphold each virtue.
*   Comedian Jerry Seinfeld writes one joke every day. He doesn’t worry about whether it’s a good or bad joke. His only concern is to never break the chain of daily jokes.

Research suggests that people who track their behaviors are more likely to maintain progress than those who do not. **Create a visual representation of your success chain, and you will make it more difficult to break.** This idea is supported by three of the four laws of habit formation: make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it satisfying.

Habit tracking makes a habit more obvious, in that each paper clip moved, day marked on a calendar, or journal page filled serves as a cue to perform the same action.

This technique makes behaviors more attractive because success drives desire. Progress is addicting, and the desire to continue feeling successful makes the behavior that led to those feelings attractive. This aspect is especially important on bad days when you’re less motivated to act.

*   When you can see the accumulation of successful days through visual measures, you are less likely to want to see an empty calendar square or lingering paper clip in the jar.
*   The unattractiveness of breaking the chain motivates you to act.

Finally, habit tracking makes behavior more satisfying because the act of marking a day as successful is gratifying. The ability to move a paper clip or put a red slash over a calendar box becomes the reward of completing the positive behavior. Think of how good it feels to cross an item off of your to-do list. If something feels good, you’re more likely to want to do it again.

Another benefit of habit tracking is that it keeps the focus of your efforts on the process, not the goal. **You are actively engaging in behavior that represents the person you want to be, not waiting to become that person.**

### Mitigating Failure

There is no such thing as perfection. Every person, no matter how committed to changing behavior or tracking progress they may be, will face a moment of failure. Crises happen, weather happens, and changing life circumstances happen. **The perspective you bring to the process of behavior change will determine how successful you are in the long run.**

There are a number of pitfalls that can derail progress during behavior change: the burden of habit tracking, the disappointment of breaking the chain, and the folly of tracking the wrong measure.

#### The Habit of Habit Tracking

Habit tracking in and of itself is a habit. The requirement to start a new habit to help you begin another at the same time can feel overwhelming or like a burden. Why add another habit to keep track of when it’s easier to say, “I’ll simply make more business calls” or “I’ll just write one joke a day”?

To help ease the burden of forming two habits at once, consider these mitigating actions:

1\. Start with aspects of life already automated to track activity.

*   Credit card statements track spending, Fitbits track physical activity, and electronic calendars track appointments and social behavior.
*   Commit to checking these automated trackers regularly to reduce the need for manual tracking.

2\. Only manually track significant habits.

*   Not every action in life needs to be tracked. **It will be easier if you regularly track one major behavior than try to intermittently keep track of ten.** And you will have a better chance of maintaining stamina for the action if you focus on one behavior at a time.

3\. Record the tracked measure immediately after the behavior is completed.

*   This concept uses the technique of habit stacking to use the end of a certain behavior as a cue for tracking.
*   The formula becomes “After \[habit\], I will \[track habit\].”

#### All Streaks Come to an End

It is inevitable that you will break the chain of a good habit at some point. But the end of a streak doesn’t have to mean the end of the habit. Missing one day will happen. **The key is to try to avoid missing two or more days in a row.**

The downward spiral of repeated missed days of action is what leads to the end of good habits and the formation of bad ones. One missed action makes it easier to not do it again, and so on. An all-or-nothing mentality creates the false assumption that if you can’t do it perfectly, you can’t do it at all. But missed action hurts you more than a successful action helps.

*   If you start with $100 and increase it by half, you now have $150. But it only takes a decrease of one-third to take you back to $100.
*   Avoiding a loss of one-third the value is more significant than increasing the value by half. Therefore, **doing half a habit is better than doing nothing at all**.

As stated earlier, showing up for your habit strengthens your identity, which is a major motivator in habit formation. Even on bad days, not putting up a zero for effort will be more significant than what that effort entails.

*   When you feel sluggish or lazy, going to the gym for ten minutes is still a vote for the type of person you want to be.
*   The workout you can get done in ten minutes is less important than maintaining the identity as someone who shows up and doesn’t miss a workout.

#### Meaningful Measures

Society is driven by numbers. We are consumed with measuring success according to quantifiable proof, rather than the idea behind what the numbers represent. This instinct can lead you to measure the wrong thing when tracking habits.

If you make your measure of success a quantifiable number, you will do whatever it takes to make progress toward that number, even if the action is unhealthy or outside your identity. Therefore, **if you choose the wrong measure, you will create the wrong habit**.

For instance, when trying to become a healthier person, focusing on the number on the scale will lead you down the wrong path.

*   You may start with a good process of eating healthier foods and exercising, but if the amount of weight you are able to lose plateaus and the number on the scale doesn’t change for a few days, you may feel despair. To force the number to move faster, you may resort to crash diets or excessive and dangerous exercise routines. You may feel like a failure and stop trying completely. None of these actions represent the actions of a person living a healthier life.

Each measure you track should be a vote for the identity you want. **The habit of tracking measures is meant to provide meaning to the action and motivate you, not make the measure the ultimate goal.** Just because something can be measured, doesn’t mean it should be, and vice versa.

Instead of measuring the number on the scale, find nonscale victories to measure to keep the behavior satisfying.

*   A healthier lifestyle helps improve energy. If you’re able to be more physically active, that is a measure of success. Removing unhealthy foods from your diet can improve your skin’s appearance, which makes you feel better about yourself. Losing weight can increase your sex drive, which can lead to more intimacy and stronger relationships.

**The key is to find the measure that makes maintaining a habit consistently rewarding** and allows you to continue becoming the person you want to be.

### Making Bad Habits Unsatisfying

The inversion of the fourth law is to “make it unsatisfying.” In the same way that adding a small reward can motivate behavior, adding a small consequence to certain behaviors helps reduce the motivation to act. Bad habits serve you in some way, which makes breaking them hard. **The more instantly costly a bad habit becomes, the faster you will turn from it.**

Find ways to hold yourself accountable for your actions, and slipping up or behaving badly will now have consequences. If you reframe bad habits so they elicit an instant punishment or sensation of pain, you will start plotting how to avoid them.

*   If you own a restaurant, the fear of bad reviews keeps you working to improve your menu.
*   If absences from class equate to a reduction in your overall grade, you will find a way to make it to class, even when you don’t want to go.

A **habit contract** can create accountability in your life. It’s a verbal or written agreement with one or two other people that states your intended habit and the consequences of not following through. Habit contracts are like laws that keep people in check.

Your desire for respect and approval is a major motivator, and **not wanting to fail or appear weak in front of others is a powerful incentive for good behavior**. It’s easier to break promises to yourself than it is to break promises to other people. Decide what habits you want to create or break, and make the consequence of failing to do so significant.

*   If you want to eat healthier foods, agree to pay your spouse $100 every time you eat an unhealthy snack.
*   If you want to exercise more, hire a personal trainer and agree to pay them double for missed sessions.
*   If you want to stop smoking, agree to wear a shirt promoting your rival sports team in public for a week for each cigarette you smoke.

For accountability to work, **the strength of the consequence must match the strength of the benefit gained from the behavior**. Whatever the consequence is, make sure someone else knows about it who is in a position to notice when you don’t succeed.

Chapter 7: The Pleasure Point

We all have habits we want to start or break. But willpower is often not enough of a motivator. How can the tips from this chapter help you stick to good habits and leave bad ones behind?

Exercise: Rewarding Behavior

If you want to develop habits that are easy to maintain and lead to success, choose habits that align with your capabilities. **Behaviors that highlight your strengths and interests will be more enjoyable and easier to stick with.**

### Your Genes and Your Habits

Everyone has different talents, abilities, and interests, and your genetic make-up has a lot to do with what yours are. Your genes encompass characteristics that create your personality. Although genes are immutable, they are flexible in how they support your life choices. Put your energy toward things that excite you, and your genes will give you a successful edge.

When working for you, genetic predispositions give you an advantage. When working against you, they give you a disadvantage. **Genes do not determine your destiny, but they do determine which opportunities will benefit you the most.**

Environment has a lot to do with whether your genes work for or against you. This is why selecting the right behaviors and environment is crucial for your success.

*   Consider a 7’0” muscular young man. His genetic make-up gives him height and strength, but these predispositions are only useful in the right environment.
*   If he decides to play basketball, his genes will give him an advantage.
*   If he decides to be a horse jockey, his genes will not suit him well.

One of the best ways to determine which behaviors and environments are right for you is by learning which personality traits you possess.

#### The Big 5 Personality Traits

**There are 5 personality traits, each with a spectrum of behavior that highlights who you are.** All five have biological underpinnings and typically remain unchanged throughout your life.

1.  Openness to experience—from curious and daring to cautious and unvarying.
2.  Conscientiousness—from organized and methodical to spontaneous and relaxed.
3.  Extroversion—from sociable and gregarious to reclusive and reticent.
4.  Agreeableness—from affable and caring to difficult and withdrawn.
5.  Neuroticism—from fretful and sensitive to assured and resilient.

Understanding your personality doesn’t dictate what behaviors you’re capable of performing. However, **your personality _does_ suggest which behaviors you will most likely gravitate toward and be successful with**.

*   A less agreeable person will struggle to build a habit of forming one social connection a week or sending out greeting cards.
*   An extrovert will have a harder time staying off of social media than an introvert.
*   Someone who is conscientious will have more success creating better working habits.

**There’s a version of each habit and behavior that falls along your spectrum of personality.** What works for someone else may not work the same way for you, so you must build habits based on what aligns with who you are and what you like, not on what society or your friends and family expect.

*   To lose weight, you may find that nature hikes are more enjoyable than going to a gym.
*   To write more, you may enjoy writing romance novels more than literary fiction.
*   To quit smoking, you may need assistance with patch or therapy, rather than doing it cold turkey.

**The right habit makes compliance simple and fun. The wrong habit is like pushing a cart of rocks uphill.** Whatever your path of least resistance is to your desired behavior change, follow it to experience more enjoyment and motivation.

### What Behaviors Are Right for You?

Even if you know what your personality is, knowing which behaviors suit you best may not be obvious. Use trial and error to find the right experiences and environments for success.

The process of trial and error includes periods of _exploration_ and _exploitation_. **During exploration, you should remain open to the various paths that lead to your desired identity.** Exploration occurs at the beginning of any new behavior or activity.

*   Relationships form after a number of dates.
*   A college major is chosen after a year or two of general studies.
*   A restaurant opens only after a number of soft openings.
*   Cars are sold to the public after several trial runs at the factory.

Once you explore and find a good path for or response to your desired behavior, stick with it. When you find success with a certain response, exploit that behavior or activity.

**Exploitation means repeating the successful behavior or activity again and again to gain more successful results.** Once success starts to wane, it’s time to start exploring again.

*   (Shortform example: You determine that taking a spin class is the best solution for your desire to exercise more. You stick with it and form a routine. However, the cost of the class becomes a burden on your finances. You don’t have to go back to the beginning to find something else that works. You already have a habit of sticking with exercise and like riding a bike. You explore other options, such as borrowing a friend’s bike or renting a stationary one. You decide to make a one-time expense to purchase a stationary bike at home to use long-term.)

A good balance during trial and error is to exploit successful behaviors 80% to 90% of the time and to explore other options 10% to 20% of the time.

#### Time: Friend or Foe

Not everyone has the luxury of all the time in the world to explore what works best for them. Young people have more time and opportunities to explore. Older people might have to start exploiting right away to get faster results. Regardless of which category you fall into, there are four questions that help cut through the jumble of options to help you use your time effectively.

**1\. What is fun for me but hard for others?**

Activities you enjoy that are not universally considered enjoyable point to behaviors that align with your genetic predispositions.

**2\. What makes time fly for me?**

Being in the zone, or the “flow state,” only occurs if you’re successful and engaged in what you’re doing. **Any activity that creates this sensation is in line with your genetic make-up.**

**3\. Which behaviors or activities provide returns for me that are better than the returns of others?**

Compare yourself with others and focus on behaviors that give you more success than they do other people.

**4\. What behaviors or activities come naturally to me?**

When do you come alive or feel the most like your authentic self?

#### Specialization

Some people are lucky enough to know what behaviors favor them from the beginning. Their personality gravitates toward opportunities already existing, and all that is required is hard work to find success. Others struggle to find something in life that aligns with their talents and personality. If you’re in the latter group, one solution is to make up your own place in the world.

You may have multiple behaviors that feel natural and in line with your talents and personality. You may experience marginal success in several things. If this is the case, combine two or more talents to create a niche where you can excel and where the competition is low.

*   For example, the cartoonist for the comic strip _Dilbert_ combined his talents to create his popular comic. He could draw but wasn’t as good as most artists. He was funny but not enough to be a comedian. He knew he wasn’t going to succeed in solely following one of those two paths, so he combined them and used his business background to create a career that allowed both his talents to flourish in an effective way.

Specialization helps overcome the detriment of “bad” or “subpar” genes. **You can turn any odds toward your favor if you create a more favorable environment for your talents.** Win by being different, not by being better. Create your own path for success to ensure your talents stand out.

### Genetics Are Only Half the Battle

Your inherent talents and personality will not make you successful on their own. Genes make the most of your expended energy by suggesting what you should focus on. But genes do not stand in for hard work.

You must first work hard at something before you know if the behavior or activity is truly in your wheelhouse. **Even if you are naturally gifted at something, doing nothing or putting in the smallest amount of effort will not equal success.**

*   Micheal Phelps is likely not the only person alive with a body designed optimally for swimming. But of those, he is the most successful because of years of training and sacrifices made to make the most of his genetic predisposition.

Likewise, not having a specific talent or natural gift for a certain activity does not equate to failure. You can succeed at anything you want to do as long as you put in the work. You may not reach the highest levels of achievement, like the Olympics, or have the easiest time working toward your goal, but **if you don’t put in the work, you’ll never know what you’re capable of**.

Genetics are only as useful as the means by which you use them. Find the right path for you and give it your time and focus to succeed.

Part III: Mastering Atomic Habits︱Chapter 8: It’s What’s Inside that Counts

Do you know what your genetic predispositions say about what habits are right for you?

Exercise: Making Who You Are Work for You

Losing motivation is one of the biggest killers of habit formation. You lose motivation for several reasons, including choosing the wrong habits to start, not seeing progress fast enough, and failing to allow small changes to lead to others. However, **one of the biggest killers of motivation is boredom**.

### Why You Lose Interest

We tend to believe that successful people work from a super-charged place of eagerness and fortitude. Because of this, you likely believe that you must get “amped up” to accomplish a difficult task. You take any signs of boredom as evidence that you need a new challenge. These ideas promote quitting a positive behavior simply because it’s not exciting anymore.

To really succeed at forming positive habits, you must accept that boredom is inevitable. You must also acknowledge that feeling bored doesn’t mean the behavior is no longer valid.

#### What Is Boredom?

Boredom is the state experienced when something stops being novel or entertaining. Regarding habits, **boredom occurs when new habits become automatic and easy**.

Mastery requires practice, but the more you practice one behavior, the more mundane that behavior becomes. When habits become mundane, you lose interest and start seeking novelty. You often look for something new and different to regain a sense of excitement, even if the old or current behavior is still working.

When you lose interest in a behavior, you lose motivation to keep working on your system. You are not unique in experiencing this sensation. Successful people also experience boredom. The difference is they are able to push through the lack of novelty and excitement and keep working. Successful people learn to love boredom, and to achieve success, you must learn to love it, too.

**If you are only motivated to act when things are novel or exciting, you’ll never attain consistent results.** Showing up and working hard even when bored or uninspired is what separates greatness from goodness. You may not enjoy the work when you’re bored or not in the mood, but you have to put in the reps if you want to keep improving toward your ultimate goal and identity.

### How to Combat Boredom

Learning how to stay motivated means designing habits that draw you in, rather than repel you. One of the best-known strategies for keeping behaviors interesting is working at a level of _just manageable difficulty_.

Your brain loves a challenge, but this love is fickle. If the challenge is not hard enough, you will lose interest. If the challenge is too hard, you will be unsuccessful in your behavior attempts and shy away from trying.

*   Playing tennis against a 5-year-old will be too easy and lead to boredom.
*   Playing tennis against Serena Williams will be way too hard and certainly lead to failure. (If not, you may have a Grand Slam championship in your future!)
*   Either extreme will not help you engage with the activity or behavior.

**The perfect degree of challenge for the brain is when you perform at a level that lives on the edge of your current abilities.** This idea is referred to as the _Goldilocks Rule_, which states that degrees of difficulty must be _just right_ to attain peak motivation.

#### The Goldilocks Rule

You must start a new behavior by _making it easy_, as the third law states. Making a new behavior easy to perform and maintain is necessary and helps you stay focused even when motivation is challenged. But once a behavior has reached the habit line, you must increase the boundary of difficulty in small increments to keep it challenging.

If a behavior is just challenging enough, you will be more interested in sticking with it. Hitting the “just right” zone of difficulty is what creates the flow state, wherein you are fully engaged in the behavior or activity. A 4% increase in difficulty above your current abilities or behaviors is required to reach the flow state.

*   Imagine playing with a new tennis partner equal in skill level. You play for months, and you start to naturally progress beyond your current abilities.
*   If your partner doesn’t progress at the same rate, you will soon beat them easily and lose interest.
*   If you find a new partner who is slightly better than your new level, you will be more engaged when you play because you are being challenged more.
*   You will eventually progress to the new level and so on as you continue to play better opponents.

**Improvement requires a balance between pushing beyond status quo to stay challenged and keeping the level of challenge at a point that still allows for satisfying results.**

Part of this process of increasing degrees of difficulty is the _variable reward_. When you increase your challenge level to the just-right point, whether you fail or succeed becomes equal in likelihood.

When there is a 50/50 chance of success or failure, your desire to win increases. You experience enough success to warrant continued action and enough failure to make you work harder. **Rewards experienced in this type of variable way make every attempt novel, which reduces boredom.**

Still, at some point, even if you are able to create variable rewards through just manageable difficulty, you will be faced with boredom. Understanding that this will occur, regardless of your efforts, will help you address it when it comes and keep you from falling into the traps automated habits can create.

### The Bad and Ugly of Automatic Behaviors

As discussed, you can only move to the next level in your habit system after forming automatic behavior. However, there are aspects of automatic behaviors that hurt more than help.

When behavior becomes automated, the action becomes mindless, which reduces your ability to notice small errors or opportunities for growth. You become less receptive to feedback the more mindless a behavior becomes. You stop thinking of ways to improve because you have learned to perform the behavior “good enough.”

Once you can perform a behavior at a “good enough” level, you start to believe that simply putting in good-enough reps equals experience and progress. Really, **all you’re doing is reinforcing current behavior, not attempting to build on that behavior**. This assumption is what leads to decline after a good-enough level is mastered. You can’t continue the same behavior and expect to get different results.

Stopping with the first or second habit in your system doesn't lead to the overall identity or optimal goal you're seeking. Working through the tiny aspects of your system means allowing each level to become automatic, then using that foundation to move to the next level. **You have to continue building on habits once they become “good enough” so you can keep moving through your system to the end.**

A combination of automatic behaviors and deliberate practice is required. Deliberate practice means finding ways to increase the degree of difficulty in your system to add new skills or behaviors. **Once a habit is formed, you must deliberately practice the next level to keep improving.**

(Shortform example: Your desired identity is to be a skilled athlete. You choose basketball as your opening and learn to make a jump shot from five feet away. You master this skill, making basket after basket until you know longer have to think about form. If you were to stop with this good-enough behavior, you’d find little success in an actual basketball game. If you move back a foot after mastering each preceding distance, you’ll eventually be able to shoot a three-pointer. Similarly, if you add a defender to your practice, you’ll learn how to make the five-foot shot under pressure. Now, you'll be able to compete in a game-like scenario.)

#### Negative Thoughts

Another negative aspect of automated behaviors is the way in which they skew your thinking about your skills and identity. As you begin to form behaviors that support your chosen identity, it’s easy to become cocky or boastful about who you’re becoming.

Like good-enough behaviors, **when you are cocky about mastering one aspect of your identity, you stop seeing weak spots or ways to grow**. You latch on to this mastered behavior and the supported identity and believe the work is done.

The problem with this narrow focus is that life does not stop presenting challenges just because you’ve stopped growing. When you define your identity through the lens of one action, behavior, or aspect, you are not prepared for the challenges that arise and your identity becomes fragile. **If you lose the thing that defines your identity, you lose yourself.**

*   If you’ve been successful at removing animal products from your diet and latch on to your new identity as a vegan, what happens if you are no longer able to maintain that diet? If you develop a health condition that requires animal proteins, who will you become now that you can no longer identify as a vegan?
*   If your band discovers a unique sound and reaches #1 with your debut album, your identity may be tied up in that sound. But your sound is no longer unique after people hear your first album, so what does that mean for your band and your second album?

**The key is to redefine your identity to include the important aspects of the system, not the end result of one aspect.** Therefore, if you lose that one aspect, you still have others and the identity they add up to.

*   “I’m a vegan” becomes “I’m a person who eats conscientiously and healthily.”
*   “We’re a band with a unique sound” becomes “We’re a band who pushes boundaries and strays from conventions.”

When defining your identity in the right way, it becomes flexible, not fragile. **A flexible identity goes with the flow of life, rather than fights against it.** If you’re struggling to improve, reflect on your habits and thoughts about identity to ensure they’re still working for you. If not, readjust your thinking to create more space for growth.

#### A Few Words about Reflection

When you reflect on your behaviors and habits, you review your progress thus far, which provides a measure of successes and failures. With this measure, you learn where improvements are needed and locate the right paths for growth.

**Identify mistakes and paths for growth to ensure you’re putting energy toward the right systems of behavior.** Examine your processes to learn how to adjust your behaviors for optimal success. Without reflection and review, it’s easy to fall into the traps of mindless good-enough behaviors and negative thoughts. You start making excuses for why you’re not improving instead of making informed decisions about what to adjust.

Reflection and review are excellent strategies for keeping you honest about your behaviors and identity, but too much can be a bad thing. Too much examination or feedback doesn’t provide time to see the accumulative benefits or detriments of current behaviors. **Change and growth are slow processes, so reflection and review should only be performed periodically** to get an accurate gauge.

Chapter 9: How to Keep Showing Up and Pushing Through

Keeping your behaviors moving in a direction of variable rewards is a good way to keep them challenging and interesting. How can you improve your good-enough behaviors to keep moving forward?

Exercise: Are You Being Challenged?

When you define your identity through the lens of a single action, behavior, or aspect, your identity becomes fragile. Redefine your identity to focus on a system of characteristics.

Exercise: Is Your Identity Flexible or Fragile?

It’s hard to fathom that one small change in behavior can truly transform your entire life. But through the processes described in _Atomic Habits_, you’ve learned that small adjustments in the right behavior systems can lead to long-term success. Knowing this, is there any reason to think that one small change can’t snowball into a different mode of living?

If you’re still dubious, think about the example of a self-made millionaire. This person didn’t start out with a pile of money and simply add more to it. They started with nothing and made small gains financially. They built upon those gains one by one until they’d amassed a large sum of money, or their first million. The processes by which they did this varied.

*   They made small investments, turning small sums of cash into large sums of cash.
*   They used their profits to expand their business or purchase property, which brought in more money.
*   They put money into savings accounts with high interest returns.

They have all the money they could need now because of the success of these actions, but they had to start with that first dollar before any of it could have happened.

That first dollar is no different than your first 1% increase in behavior change. **Your life cannot dramatically change without the first small effort toward doing so.** If you maintain small changes and continue moving forward, eventually the scales of success will tip in your favor.

Habit formation is not a flash-in-the-pan process with a beginning and end. **Habits require constant reflection and refinement so you can adjust behaviors to suit your systems and goals as you grow and transform.**

The main ingredient to lasting success is persistence in looking for ways to keep adding small improvements to your behaviors. If you keep moving forward, you’ll eventually reach the life you want to live.

### Helpful Concepts to Keep in Mind

(Shortform note: The information that follows was provided as an appendix in the book. These ideas are meant to further breakdown some tips and insights about the 4 Laws of Habit Formation.)

**1\. Awareness must precede desire.**

Your brain must first assign an emotion or feeling to a cue for a craving to kick in. Therefore, you can only crave an opportunity your brain has become aware of.

**2\. Happiness equals a state of contentment.**

Contrary to popular belief, the state of being happy is not a product of experiencing pleasure. Happiness is what occurs in between the rewards phase and the craving phase, when you are content with your current state and have no immediate desires.

**3\. We are motivated by the idea of pleasure, rather than pleasure itself.**

When you respond to fulfill a desire, you have an inkling of the reward you will receive, but you don’t know how much satisfaction you will feel. Therefore, the idea of the reward is what motivates you to act.

**4\. Observations are only problems if you make them such.**

A craving is a desire to solve a problem. You will only be prompted to act if you observe that there is a problem to solve. If you do not assign a change in an emotional or physical state to a cue, you can simply observe it and be at peace.

**5\. You can form any behavior as long as you understand _why_ it’s being formed.**

If your desire is great enough, your motivation to act will be equally strong. Therefore, if you understand the depths of why you will act, you will feel prompted to act, even if the action is extreme or difficult.

**6\. Always seek more knowledge.**

You may be the smartest person in the world, but your current intelligence alone is not a motivator for action. Only craving a state of change will drive your behavior. Therefore, if you remain curious and thirsty for more knowledge, you will be open to action.

**7\. Emotions influence action.**

There may be a million intellectual reasons to do something, but you will only feel motivated to do it if there are emotions attached to the behavior. This is why the craving precedes the response and why two people can experience the same cue and react differently.

**8\. Emotions must proceed rationale and logic.**

Your brain is structured to always consider the emotional aspects of something first and the logic second. Understanding this will help you learn how to approach and manage emotional responses to cues in your life.

**9\. Suffering leads to progress.**

The root of all suffering is a yearning for change. Wanting something different or more in life is what causes you to respond with action. Therefore, suffering can be seen as the pathway for progress, rather than a static state of dissatisfaction.

**10\. Behaviors highlight your desire.**

What you do relates to what you want. Because you will only act when a desire for change occurs, you can take an honest look at your current actions to see what your current desires are. If you say something is a priority but take no action, you likely don’t really believe that.

**11\. Sacrifice leads to rewards.**

You must sacrifice energy to receive the subsequent reward. Doing nothing will provide nothing. You must be willing to sacrifice if you wish to see results.

**12\. Self-control is never satisfying.**

A reward is only experienced when a desire is satisfied. Therefore, denying your cravings is not satisfying and will not lead to habit formation. To change a bad habit, a new response must be linked with your desire.

**13\. Keep your expectations at a satisfactory level.**

A reward only links back to a cue if it is satisfying. Therefore, set realistic expectations for how satisfying the result of an action will be. If you have low expectations and receive more, you are delighted and satisfied. If you have high expectations and receive less, you feel dissatisfied. When your wants begin to outweigh your likes, you will be in a constant state of dissatisfaction.

**14\. The pain of failing corresponds to the degree of expectations.**

The phrase, “Don’t get your hopes up,” is meant to warn of the dismal feelings that follow not receiving what you thought you would get. Failing to attain something small hurts less than failing to attain something massive. A failure in one part of the system doesn’t have to mean total failure if you manage your expectations for each action.

**15\. Wanting motivates, winning maintains.**

Wanting inspires action. Liking solidifies behavior. This is why the rewards of your actions must be satisfying. You can feel motivated to act, but if you don’t like the result, you won’t feel the desire to act in the same way again.

**16\. Hope will eventually fade into acceptance with experience.**

The first time you assign a desire to a cue, you develop hope for the promise encompassed in the corresponding action. After that first time, you understand what the reward is, so there’s no reason to hope. The need to experience hope can be powerful enough to pull you away from stable, predictable actions.

Chapter 10: Habits for the Future and Beyond

You might be wondering why it’s better to manage expectations than shoot for the moon. Now that you understand the relationship between satisfaction and expectations, how can you apply this relationship to previous pain experienced due to failure?

Exercise: The Path to the Moon

Throughout this summary, you’ve learned about different ways of thinking about habits and how to address behaviors in your life. How has the information in _Atomic Habits_ helped you view your behavioral trajectory now and in the future?

Exercise: Your Future Identity and Behaviors

Atomic Habits

**Principles**

*   Deep work is focused, uninterrupted, undistracted work on a task that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit.
*   The best ideas and the most meaningful progress come from deep work, not shallow work.
    *   Shallow work answers emails, produces reports, and flits from meeting to meeting.
    *   Deep work creates breakthrough business ideas, exposes new research questions, and solves complex problems.
*   **Deep work is critical for your performance as a knowledge worker.** It helps you develop new skills and employ those skills to produce output. If you can do both more effectively than others, you will take a leading position in the “information economy.”
*   You have two challenges:
    *   Develop your ability to focus more intensely and for longer periods.
    *   Develop your ability to resist distractions
*   **The ability to concentrate must be trained like a muscle.** You can’t use it if you haven’t trained it. But if you train it in a structured way and push yourself to your limit, it will get stronger.
*   Every time you get distracted and indulge the distraction, you weaken your ability to focus and to resist distractions. **If you check your phone every time you get bored, you reinforce your brain’s rewiring to be addicted to distraction**.
    *   Furthermore, the switching cost is high (taking more time to get back on task), and you retain some mental residue from whatever distracted you.
*   Studies show that the capacity for intense deep work is about 4 hours per day, even for experts. Novices can do only about an hour per day.
*   **Focus on the wildly important goals, ruthlessly**. Exclude all the other frivolities that don’t add meaningfully to your life.
    *   Resist the temptation to justify your distractions because they confer some mild benefit (eg “Facebook helps me keep in touch with my high school friends.”) It is very likely that the opportunity cost is high – you can put that time into something that more effectively accomplishes your goal (eg taking Facebook time to call a friend).
*   Don’t see focus as a special period in the day. **See distraction as a break away from focus**.

**Strategies**

*   **Make deep work a ritual. Don’t make it about willpower.**
    *   The most common forms are to schedule regular blocks of deep work everyday (say, 8AM-11AM) or to take regular >1-day deep work sabbaticals every week.
*   Diagnose your current practices.
    *   Articulate your major life goals, and the 2-3 key activities that will drive you toward them.
    *   List your current time spend on tasks, and Internet usage. Examine the pros and cons of each major task, and whether they drive toward the goals above.
    *   Experiment with completely shutting down your less important tasks above.
*   Create an environment conducive to deep work.
    *   **Choose a working space dedicated to deep work**, like a meeting room or library. You will associate this space with deep work.
    *   Reduce distractions – noise, hunger, thirst, novel information. (For best results I power down my phone and turn off my computer’s Internet).
*   **Try to eliminate shallow work from your day.** Say no to new tasks that are shallow work; confine shallow work like answering emails to specific blocks. Again, distraction is a break away from focus.
*   **Create a beginning of day ritual:**
    *   Schedule 30-minute blocks of time for the entire day.
        *   Set challenging deadlines for yourself. You need to barely be able to meet the deadline if you focus really intensely. This is a forcing function.
    *   Quantify the complexity of tasks.
        *   Heuristic: How long would it take a smart college grad with no experience to do what you’re doing? The longer this takes, the more complex it is, and the more deep work will help it.
    *   Schedule when you’ll use your distraction of choice. Do not use it anytime else outside of this.
*   Cap your workday rigidly (eg stop hard at 6PM). You need time to relax, and because of the 4-hour daily limit to deep work, you’re not productive at the end of the day.
*   **Create a work shutdown ritual for the end of the workday** (this will close mental loops and prevent you from worrying about work outside of work):
    *   Check your email one last time to make sure nothing urgent is missing.
    *   Review your todo list and making sure they are handled in the upcoming days.
    *   Make a todo list for the next day.
    *   Say explicitly, “shutdown complete” or some similar phrase.
*   Have a conversation with your boss and team about reducing your shallow work time. Set expectations around your email reply time, your availability for meetings, and how to de-bottleneck people dependent on you.
*   Keep these continuous tasks in mind:
    *   Commit to cutting out distractions during focus periods, to train your mental muscle.
    *   Notice when you’re losing focus, and bring your attention gently back to center.
    *   When you get tempted to lose focus (eg check your phone), remember that suppressing your distraction is training your focus muscle. You’ll be stronger for successfully resisting.
    *   Reply thoughtfully to emails with clear current status, ultimate goal, and most effective next steps.
    *   Say no to shallow work, without offering concessions.

**“Deep work” is focused, uninterrupted, _undistracted_ work on a task that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limit**.

In contrast, “shallow work” describes tasks that aren’t cognitively demanding - like answering email, filling out paperwork, and attending unproductive meetings. These tasks don’t create much value and are easy for others to replicate.

**Groundbreaking ideas and meaningful progress come from deep work, not shallow work.** Shallow work is incremental. Deep work can be transformational.

When founding Microsoft in 1974, Bill Gates was obsessive about creating the company’s first software product. He worked with incredible intensity, falling asleep on his keyboard while programming, then waking up a few hours later and resuming. Even among talented technologists, Gates was renowned for his concentration and deep work.

As our economy changes, deep work becomes more valuable. Over the past decades, the economy has moved away from brute force labor to information. The old economy – working in a manufacturing plant – didn’t require deep work for most workers. But now skills that succeed in the new economy – like complex problem solving, data analysis, and computer programming – require deep work to learn and execute. **Your ability to do deep work will determine how much you thrive in this economy.**

Ironically, the **same technologies that _caused_ the information economy are _depleting_ our ability to conduct deep work**. Phones, emails, and addictive apps pull us away every few minutes. Thus, the time when deep work is most important is when it is most difficult.

The ability to do deep work behaves like muscle strength. If your mind is at a basal level of distraction and anxiety all day, you can lose your ability to do deep work. It becomes harder to summon the skills to focus and remain undistracted.

Building deep work takes dedicated practice and focus. That’s why some famously productive people carve out dedicated time for deep work:

*   Bill Gates takes think weeks twice a year, isolating himself to read and think big thoughts.
*   Woody Allen doesn’t own a computer, preferring to write on a manual typewriter instead. This avoids all the tempting distractions of the computer.
*   Nobel laureate and physicist Richard Feynman wanted to escape operational and bureaucratic tasks, so he invented a myth that he was irresponsible. No one trusted him with being a department head then!

This book is divided into two parts. First, we’ll cover the idea behind deep work, why it’s rare today, and why it’s so valuable. Then we’ll cover the strategies and tactics you’ll need to engage in deep work.

In the information economy, people who have the ability to master complex machines and solve complex problems are the ones who will be more valued.

Deep work allows you to do two things critical to your performance in this economy:

1\. **Learn and master new skills**. Today’s economy changes so quickly that a technology or best practice that was hot 5 years ago might be obsolete today. This is true of fields as wide-ranging as computer programming, marketing, academic research, and financial investments. To continue staying relevant over decades, you must continue to learn new skills. And learning challenging new skills requires focused concentration.

2\. **Apply the skills to increase your output**. Once you’ve learned a skill, you need to do something useful to it. Consider the simple rule: High-quality work produced = Time Spent x Intensity of Focus. And once again, the application of highly technical skills requires deep focus.

If you want to have a successful career lasting decades, **you need to repeat these two practices over and over again**. You’ll need to change skills as new technologies and practices arise, and you’ll need to produce real results with those skills.

Furthermore, the changing economy also increases competition for your job, making it more critical to update your skills. Technology is increasingly making remote work more commonplace, putting the greatest talent around the world in reach of companies. If you’re currently employed in an office, this means one of your competitive advantages – a warm body close to headquarters – will be diminished, and you will have to increase your skill to compensate and compete with remote talent.

**Why, specifically, does deep work help you with learning and productivity?** A major reason is that **distractions are very costly**.

*   When you switch between tasks, the costs to attention are high. With every switch, you retain some mental residue from the previous task. It takes longer for you to adjust to the new task because of this residue - it might be minutes before you get into the groove of the new task. Even worse, if you’re switching between tasks every few minutes, you might have zero time in which you’re fully focused.
*   Distraction might even change your brain on a molecular level. Myelination, a process of modifying your neurons to make them more effective, is critical to training neural circuits and improving your skill. And in an environment of deep focus without distractions, myelination seems to be more effective.

Overall, you likely assume that your shallow work (fast email turnaround, meetings) are critical to productivity, and dropping them will lower your standing. **Just try an experiment to take a break from email for a day or cancel all your meetings.** You’ll likely find that the fires took care of themselves, and the building didn’t burn down.

(Minor point from the chapter: How can Jack Dorsey be so productive while managing two large companies (Twitter and Square)? (Shortform example: Similarly, Elon Musk manages both SpaceX and Tesla). Surely their days are full of distractions, filled with endless meetings and fast decisions?

Cal Newport argues that these CEOs have specialized their roles to be “hard-to-automate decision machines.” For these companies, it’s more efficient for lieutenants to do the deep work on a hairy problem. The CEO’s role is then to review and make a judgment. Thus they incur less of a penalty for their many distractions.)

Idea #1: Deep Work is Important

Think about what deep work means for you.

Exercise: What’s Your Deep Work?

If deep work is so valuable, why don’t we do it more often? Because we face constant distraction every few minutes.

**The three major detractors from deep work that workers face daily are:**

*   Open offices
    *   At one point, open office floorplans had good intentions. They were meant to increase collaboration and cross-pollination between teams.
    *   But nowadays, they cause a continuously distracting environment, where every conversation is heard, and one person can disrupt dozens of people.
*   Instant communication
    *   Emails were distracting enough. Instant communication takes it to another level. With tools like Slack and texting, people can interrupt your work on-demand and expect help within seconds. We stop being deep thinkers and become human network routers.
    *   Superficially, instant communication is preferred as the easy path. If you don’t know something, you can just ask someone. You don’t need to do the hard work of planning ahead, studying what you do or don’t know, and scheduling meetings thoughtfully.
*   Social media
    *   On Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and other social apps, the conversations continue endlessly, 24/7. You can get stuck in an eternal state of dialogue.
    *   The effects are insidious. The new content you see always seems novel and productive, but it doesn’t move you closer to the major things you really care about.

These distractions are ubiquitous in the corporate setting. This is confusing - companies usually aren’t dumb. If they know something is drastically lowering productivity and profits, they’ll usually move to stop it. But the reaction seems to be the opposite - distractions like open offices and real-time messaging are _supported_ by companies.

**How did these destructive distractions get adopted systematically as the right thing to do?** Cal Newport explains:

*   The new information economy brought a new management challenge - how to measure output from individual workers.
    *   In a factory, output was clear and quantitative - you produce so many widgets in an hour, and you can be compared on equal footing with other workers.
    *   In information jobs, complex problems often require a larger team of people with different roles. It no longer becomes clear who contributes what. People’s jobs become more diffuse and vague - a “marketing manager” could be doing lots of different things with different projects.
*   So managers had to seek **superficial proxies of progress** – email response times, meetings conducted. As long as there was a lot of motion, surely people were being productive!
    *   In contrast, deep work looks like slacking. Stepping away from email to think deep thoughts seems indulgent, when everyone else is buzzing around the office.
*   There is also a technological imperative that “any technology is likely good technology.” There’s pressure to look like you’re on the vanguard of technology (to press, potential employees, customers). This makes you adopt new tools like Slack, social media and open office plans without deeply considering their impact.

If there were solid proof that deep work was value-driving and shallow work was not, then companies would switch right away. But there isn’t. Information work remains hard to measure. **So people gravitate toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment**, instead of doing the hard thing.

This is why deep work is so rare, and shallow work so common.

Idea #2: Deep Work is Difficult

Think about what takes you away from deep work.

Exercise: Your Greatest Distractions

**Shallow work is deceptively bad because it _feels_ productive and meaningful**. Answering emails feels like you’re doing something. Staying on top of the office conversation in Slack makes you feel updated on what’s going on.

In contrast, deep work can often feel undirected and aimless. Complex problems take long periods of thinking and incur multiple dead ends. You produce fewer concrete results, and the results come unpredictably. This can feel like you’re being unproductive. Answering emails feels like a better place to spend your time.

**To combat this perception, realize that deep work moves you more meaningfully to happiness and fulfillment.**

As previously explained, deep work is when you’re most capable of tackling your thorniest problems. Because these problems often yield the largest rewards, deep work is often far more rewarding than shallow work.

Beyond this, the book offers three other ways deep work leads to fulfillment.

First, **deep work has been found to be the state in which people feel most fulfilled**. Mizani Chifdksalti’s research on flow shows that when people concentrate on a worthwhile task and are pushed to their cognitive limit (not too hard, not too easy), they feel most satisfied.

*   Surprisingly, leisure time or pure consumption are _not_ when people report feeling most satisfied. Free time is too unstructured and requires effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
*   This seems to hit on universal behavior drivers, seeking mastery, autonomy, and purpose (for more on this, see our summary of Drive by Daniel Pink).

Second, deep work has a protective psychological effect. **Deep work insulates our mind from many distracting, often negative psychic irritants.**

*   We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances (what happens to us) when studies suggest **our happiness is really dependent on what we pay attention to**. Given the same situation, focus on positive things in a situation, and you will be happy; focus on negative things, and you will be sad.
*   When you lose focus, you tend to fixate on what’s wrong with your life, rather than what’s right. Problems tend to be more readily available than boons, and without something productive to concentrate on, you dwell on the little problems.
*   Checking email is psychologically harmful because it often represents unresolved tasks and complaining people. \[Shortform note: furthermore, if you check your email often, recency and availability bias make these issues seem more important than they really are.\]
*   Deep work protects your mind from mulling over these inconsequential irritants.
*   \[The book doesn’t comment on why superficial work can’t have positive emotional valence – say, answering happy customer emails.\]

The third point is most abstract. Philosophically, the rise of secularism and the Enlightenment removed a religious and faith-based source of meaning to many. This easily leads to nihilism. Yet the craftsman has found a source of meaning in work – “by cultivating the skill of discerning the meaning that is already there” – for instance, by finding the value in wood transformed into a table.

*   The craftsman does things that are superficially menial – sculpting marble or weaving blankets – but they find value in discovering beauty within preexisting objects. The description of their task is simple, but the skill is difficult. **“We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals**” - the creed of medieval quarry workers.
*   Knowledge workers face a more difficult challenge in finding meaning. Their tasks are less well-defined, and they struggle to find satisfaction. But there is elegance in any work, if you have the right mindset – a block of computer code can be beautiful, as can a marketing slogan, business plan, or new technology.
*   Cal Newport argues that “following your passion” based on the specifics of the job is faulty thinking, and unlikely to be satisfying. Rather, with the right mindset, you can find fulfillment in any role.

Idea #3: Deep Work is Fulfilling

Now that you understand what deep work is and why it’s important, you’ll learn how to fill your schedule with deep work and reduce your time on shallow work.

To be more productive, the first step is to spend more of your time in deep work. But it’s not enough to just will yourself to do deep work on demand. The more effective approach is to approach deep work with structure, habit, and discipline.

### Make deep work a ritual. Don’t let it be a question of willpower.

While you know in our heads that you should be spending time on deep work, distractions get in the way. Distractions are things that you’d rather be doing than deep work - like eating food, sleeping, or browsing the Internet.

When you try to overcome your distractions, you use willpower to get back on task. But **you have a finite amount of willpower each day**. If you have to continuously force yourself to switch back from distractions, you’ll deplete this willpower, at which point you’ll be more vulnerable to distractions. This limits you from reaching the maximum of your deep work potential.

Instead, **if you make deep work a ritual or habit, you no longer have to employ your willpower.** Deep work happens automatically as a routine, and there are no distractions that you have to will yourself to overcome. In turn, this lengthens the time in which you’re doing deep work, and it reduces the rate of failure.

### The Four Types of Deep Work Scheduling

An effective way to build a _habit_ of deep work is to **set a deep work schedule** - setting aside time in advance to focus on deep work.

The book offers four types of deep work schedules, with different time requirements and efficacy. To be successful at doing deep work in the long term, you have to find the deep work schedule that best fits your lifestyle and work needs.

**Monastic Schedule**

*   Structure: Remove as many shallow work tasks from your life as possible. Outsource any necessary shallow work tasks to assistants. Spend nearly all your time on deep work. It’s called “monastic” because, like a monk, you spend your time somewhat isolated and in deep focus on your work.
*   Examples: Some authors go off the grid and aren’t contactable by email or through social media. All correspondence comes in by postal mail or through their editor.
*   Pros: You get extended periods of deep work – it becomes your default working style, not something you have to plan for.
*   Cons: This is too luxurious for most people to be able to do given the requirements of their career.

**Bimodal/Periodic Schedule**

*   Structure: Carve out regular periods each week, month, or entire parts of the year to focus on deep work. The book stresses that the period should be **at least 1 full day** to reach the maximum intensity of deep work (a few hours each morning is insufficient)
*   Examples: Professors often take semester-long sabbaticals to focus on deep research. Bill Gates takes "think weeks" twice a year. You might carve out a 3-day block of the week where you aren’t able to be contacted, while preserving the other 2 days for shallower work.
*   Pros: This is more realistic than the monastic schedule. Setting aside at least 1 full day of deep work produces the maximum concentration intensity.
*   Cons: Despite being more realistic, it’s still impractical for many workers, who are logistically required to perform certain tasks daily.

**Rhythmic Schedule**

*   Structure: Set aside a regular block of time each day to focus on deep work.
*   Examples: Set aside the morning (eg 8AM to 11AM) for deep work, before jumping into shallow work.
*   Pros: The regularity is conducive to forming a habit. It’s more realistic for most careers and lifestyle.
*   Cons: By being restricted to less than a full day, it doesn’t give the full day of deep work that the Monastic and Periodic schedules provide.

**Ad hoc/Journalistic Schedule**

*   Structure: Find time to do deep work when you get it.
*   Examples: When visiting your in-laws, carve out a few hours to do work, before meeting back up with your family.
*   Pros: This is the most flexible. You can conduct deep work at any point when it’s possible.
*   Cons: Because it’s irregular, it’s the least successful in setting up a habit. It requires the ability to switch on deep work instantaneously. Because it’s more variable, you’re more likely to run into distractions and thus more likely to consume willpower.

As a side note, Anders Ericsson, author of _Peak_, notes that a novice can do only about an hour a day of intense concentration. **Experts who have extensive practice can expand to up to 4 hours, but rarely are able to exceed this**. (Shortform note: [Read our summary of _Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise_ here](https://www.shortform.com/app/book/peak).)

### Building an Environment for Deep Work

In addition to scheduling time for deep work, you should also build your environment to be most supportive of deep work. Suggestions:

*   Choose where to do deep work
    *   Ideally, choose a place that you go to ONLY for deep work (like a conference room, the library, or an office in your home). In this place, you will do only deep work and no shallow work. Keep your shallow work in another place dedicated only for shallow work. Compartmentalizing your location this way will cement the habit of deep work more strongly.
*   Create a distraction-free environment
    *   Remove your most appealing distractions. Shut down Internet connectivity.
    *   (Shortform suggestion: Shut off your phone and put it in a place that’s annoying to reach. If you must use the Internet, consider installing website blockers in your web browsers.)
*   Add supporting materials
    *   Add things that will make your deep work more focused, like starting with coffee, having enough food, integrating light exercise.

### Deep Work Practices

Once you have the schedule and the environment, what do you actually _do_ to engage in deep work? The book offers a few suggestions

#### The 4 Disciplines of Execution

These 4 principles come from the book of the same name.

1.  Focus on the wildly important.
    *   Rationale: Choosing what to work on is important. You should spend time on things that have the largest impact.
    *   Instead of trying to say no to trivial distractions, **say yes to the “subject that arouses a terrifying longing**.” This will crowd out everything else.
    *   Choose only a small number of such goals. This way you’re forced to remove the trivial tasks, rather than maintaining a large to-do list.
2.  Act on the leading metrics.
    *   Rationale: Metrics are useful to figure out how well you’re doing and how you can improve.
    *   Definition: Leading metrics are immediately measurable. Lagging metrics measure the long-term thing you’re ultimately trying to improve. Lagging metrics are the real result, but they take too long to measure, and so they don’t give feedback in time to change your behavior.
    *   For deep work, consider leading metrics like the number of hours you’ve spent in deep work, the number of pages you’ve written, the number of new ideas you’ve generated, etc. These are all easily measurable and help you see how effective you are at deep work.
3.  Keep a scoreboard.
    *   Rationale: Making your leading metrics visible will motivate you to keep up the habit and allow celebration of successes.
    *   Keep a physical artifact in the workspace that shows your leading metric, like hours spent in deep work.
    *   If you work with other people, show metrics across your team and allow friendly competition to increase the metric.
    *   Each hour, mark off major accomplishments you achieved. This will make clear what concrete goals you’ve achieved in deep work.
4.  Create a cadence of accountability.
    *   Rationale: Periodically analyzing your deep work will keep you honest about how well you lived up to your goals. It’ll show opportunities to improve.
    *   Set up a weekly review to make a plan for the week ahead.
    *   Review good and bad weeks and what led to each.

#### Shutdown at the End of the Working Day

If you’re the type to want to be productive, it may be tempting to spend every waking hour working. Cal Newport thinks this is a counterproductive mindset, and that you should instead deliberately shut off your work and let your brain relax. Here are a few reasons.

First, as mentioned before, even experts can only accomplish 4 hours of intense concentration each day. At the end of the day, your brain is depleted of willpower and is usually at its least effective in doing effective tasks. If you try to work, you’ll often waste your time doing shallow work slowly, possibly tasks that didn’t need to be done at all.

Secondly, giving your brain time to relax is useful for solving difficult problems. This arises from two theories of thought:

*   Unconscious Thought Theory: the subconscious parts of the brain are constantly working in the background to solve problems, in ways you can’t perceive. This subconscious work is high bandwidth and sifts through lots of possible solutions. In a stressful environment, such as one where your brain is overworked and given no chance to relax, your subconscious is less effective at this. (Shortform note: this may also explain why some surprisingly good insights come at relaxing but otherwise odd times, like while in the shower or driving a car.)
*   Attention Restoration Theory: like willpower, your ability to focus is limited and needs to be recharged. Deliberately setting aside time to relax today improves your focus tomorrow.

Both suggest that **giving your brain time to relax is useful for solving difficult problems**.

**So how do you shut off work and relax?** The book suggests creating a shutdown ritual, where you check your work for anything you forgot and plan your next day’s work. Here’s an example ritual:

*   Check your emails for any last urgent items.
*   Keep a todo list of unresolved items.
*   Make sure every item in the todo list is scheduled to be completed.
*   Look through your calendar to make sure there aren’t important deadlines you forgot.
*   Make a todo list of tasks tomorrow.
*   Say “shutdown complete” or some equivalent phrase to explicitly mark the end of work.

The important concept here is to **convince yourself that things will be fine when you shutdown**. You’ll never be able to finish all your important work in one day. Instead of feeling anxious about unfinished tasks, be confident that all the important tasks are accounted for, and that you’ll make meaningful progress the next day.

One specific suggestion on how to relax after work - walking in nature. Unlike city streets, they’re cognitively undemanding, since there are no crosswalks and cars to navigate around. But they provide enough interest to the senses (sight, smell, hearing) to avoid a rambling mind.

#### Other Deep Work Tactics

Here are miscellaneous tactics to improve your deep work.

*   Consider collaborating in shared deep work. Having a thinking partner can push your thinking to the limit.
*   “Make a grand gesture” – commit an investment to jumpstart the activity.
    *   If your deep work space costs you money, you will feel more compelled to use it.
    *   Examples:
        *   While writing Harry Potter, JK Rowling rented an expensive hotel room to escape her home’s distractions.
        *   Another writer booked round-trip flights to Tokyo to write a manuscript without the distractions of normal life.
*   The ideal office floor plan: hub and spoke.
    *   The spokes contain quiet private places for people to do deep work. The hubs allow communal work.
    *   People spend time in the private places by default. As they walk down the spokes to the hubs, people will serendipitously bump into each other.
    *   In contrast, in the common open office model, workers spend time in the distracting open floor as the default. Meeting rooms are the occasional deep work area that workers need to escape to.

Rule #1: Practice Deep Work

Now that you know what enables effective deep work, let’s create your own deep work plan.

Exercise: Create Your Deep Work

While the previous chapter takes you to the limit of your deep work potential, this chapter aims to **_increase_ your potential.**

In short, **the ability to concentrate is a skill that must be trained**. Some people incorrectly think about focus as simply a voluntary action, like flossing - anyone knows how to do it and can do it at any time. In reality, **focus is more like a mental muscle - you can’t use it if you don’t train it**. The more time you spend in deep work, the better you’ll get at it.

Conversely, **habitually indulging your distractions _reduces_ your ability to concentrate**.

*   Neurologically, constant attention switching seems to have a lasting negative impact on brain effectiveness. People who switch tasks frequently and get distracted seem to be less able to filter out irrelevancy - they initiate larger parts of their brain that are irrelevant to the task at hand.
*   Behaviorally, if every moment of boredom in your life is relieved with reaching for your smartphone, your brain has likely been rewired to be addicted to distraction and novelty. You become hooked on discovering new information, and boredom becomes unbearable. This makes it harder to resist distractions.

If you want to build your deep work ability, you’ll need to learn to focus better.

One mindset suggestion: it’s common for people to see focus as a specialized dedicated period, and distraction as the default. Instead, invert this – **focus is your default state, and distraction is a break away from focus**.

*   For example, some people take an Internet Sabbath (no Internet on Sunday) to avoid distraction for a day. But as an analogy to dieting, this is like eating well one day while eating terribly the rest of the week - you’re still going to gain weight.

### Techniques to Increase Your Ability to Focus

**Schedule in advance when you’ll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.**

Rationale: It’s not just the Internet use that cripples your focus – it’s the **frequent switching** from low-stimuli to high-stimuli activities that trains your mind never to tolerate boredom. By segregating Internet time, you reduce the number of times you give in to distraction.

*   Schedule internet use times explicitly in your schedule.
*   Keep a notepad nearby where you record the next time you’re allowed to use the Internet.
*   **If your Internet time is thirty minutes away, but you have a craving, then resisting the craving will train your muscle to be stronger at resisting.** It will get easier and easier to focus for longer periods of time without the itch.
*   Plan your work so you don’t need the Internet to make progress. If you get stuck by not being able to access the Internet, then move on to another task. Plan better next time.
*   If you do this primarily at work, then don’t stop this practice at home after work. This will undo the training you did at work.

**Set intense deadlines for yourself in which you must concentrate at the limit of your ability to make the deadline.**

Rationale: Setting an aggressive deadline will force you to focus. There’s no way you can give in to distraction and still make your deadline.

*   Estimate how long you’d normally schedule for the task. **Then cut down the time drastically**, and set it as your deadline.

**Practice productive meditation – think about a problem while you do a low-intensity physical activity, like walking or showering.**

Rationale: This environment helps problem-solving in two ways: 1) you’re typically away from distractions, and 2) you train your ability to focus on the problem at hand, rather than daydream.

*   **Preload the problem in your head** so you have enough to mull over. Remember what variables to consider, and what the desired output or the important question is. Don’t just go in empty-headed because you won’t have enough content to work with.
    *   Example: if you’re working on a book chapter, the variables are the main points you want to make in the chapter. You can then work through how you want to flesh out the main points and sequence them in the chapter.
*   Like mindfulness meditation, notice when you have lost focus and bring it gently back to the problem. This too trains your mental muscles to focus and resist distraction.
*   Beware of “looping” endlessly at a superficial level you understand, without diving deep into areas that you’re not sure about. This is a sign that you’re just doing things that are comfortable for you, not making progress on the really difficult and meaningful parts.

**Practice memorization techniques.**

Rationale: Cal Newport argues that if you learn to memorize effectively, you train the concentration muscle so that it spills over into the rest of your work. Memory competition champions seem to do well not because of any innate brain capability, but rather because of their memorization technique and their ability to focus.

*   For example, if you train yourself to memorize the order of 52 shuffled playing cards, you will develop a level of focus that will improve your focus in work.
*   Suggested technique: people memorize images far more easily than an abstract string of characters. Therefore, one memory technique for memorizing a pack of cards is to associate each card with an image, then memorize the images in order. Specifically:
    *   Picture 5 rooms in a house. Imagine walking through that house.
    *   Picture 10 objects in each of these rooms, then 2 in the basement. Memorize their location and look as you walk through the house.
    *   Associate each of the 52 cards with a person or thing. For example, the King of Diamonds might be Donald Trump.
    *   Associate each of the 52 cards with the 52 objects. For instance, Donald Trump is in the bedroom turning on a lamp. Once you memorize this, you can walk through the house and recall what object is being interacted with by which person.
    *   When the deck is shuffled, the objects remain in the same order, but the person interacting with each one has changed (it might now be Bill Gates turning on the lamp).

After practicing these focus practices daily for months, you’ll increase your ability to do deep work, and you’ll reach increasing levels of focus intensity.

Rule #2: Improve Your Ability to Focus

If you increase your ability to focus, you’ll get more done in your deep work time. Here are three exercises to train your focus.

Exercise: Increase Your Focus

A key to spending more time in deep work is to avoid distractions that take you out of deep work.

For many people, the greatest distraction is the Internet, and particularly social media. The book dedicates a chapter to ridding yourself of social media as a distraction. If social media isn’t a big problem for you, some of these principles can be generalized to your personal distraction demon.

### The Problem with Social Media

Social media, and much of the Internet in general, is _designed_ to get you addicted to its content. These are lightweight whimsies, unimportant distractions derailing you from meeting your true goals.

Like shallow work, **social media is insidious in that it seems like you’re doing productive things, when really the gains are minor.** For example, people believe that Facebook connects them to people or surfaces relevant news. This sounds good in principle, but the real result is superficial. The acquaintances you’re making are shallow and unlikely to be the center of your social life - for people you really care about, you’ll arrange to see them outside of Facebook. Similarly, the news you’re digesting may be fun to read, but they mostly don’t move you closer to your major life goals.

To counteract this, some people have declared Internet sabbaticals, where they go completely off the grid for a month. Cal Newport thinks this is missing the point – it’s not necessary to be a Luddite, just like artisans don’t forego all tools made of metal. Social media has its uses - they just need to be carefully considered.

### Justify Your Internet Usage

When deciding whether to use a tool like social media, many people use the “any benefit” argument - a **technology tool is justified if it conveys “any benefit at all” from its use**.

But this dilutes your focus, since concentrating your time on the most effective tools will make you more productive.

In contrast to the “any benefit” justification, **make a well-reasoned argument about the tool’s benefits, cost, and the opportunity cost**. This will maximize your output.

Here’s how:

*   **Make a list of the most important goals to you – professionally and personally.**
*   **Then list the two or three most important activities that help you progress toward the goal.**
    *   These activities should be specific enough to know what to do, but general enough that they’re not a one-time outcome.
    *   “Do good research” is too vague, “Finish paper A” is too one-time and doesn’t suggest a repeatable practice to keep moving you forward. Instead, “regularly read the cutting-edge papers in the field” is better.
*   For each of your major tools (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc), describe whether/how they contribute meaningfully to your important goals.
    *   If your personal goal is to develop meaningful relationships with those close to you, Facebook is likely inferior to calling old friends and scheduling outings.
    *   If your professional goal is to develop innovative products that solve people’s problems, then spending time on Reddit or marketing yourself on Twitter may be less effective than focusing on the problem area and talking to experts in the field.
*   Tally up the time you spend on the distraction. Propose alternative activities that would get you closer to your major goals. These more meaningful activities are the true opportunity cost - if you spend time on unproductive tools, you have less time to spend on more productive activities.
*   **Adopt the tool only if the benefits substantially outweigh the negative impact and the opportunity cost.** Consider whether you should put that time into the alternate activities.
    
    Most likely, you’ll find that a few significant activities drive most of the progress toward your most important goals. Once you discover this, you’ll be able to discard the numerous tasks that aren’t actually productive.
    

### Tactics for Better Internet Usage

The book suggests two ways to reduce your addiction to the Internet or social media.

**1) Take an experiment and quit using your Internet drug of choice. Quit for 30 days and see what happens.** Afterward, consider whether your life would have been notably better if you had been able to use that service.

*   What holds people back from quitting is the conceit that people care what you have to say. In reality, much of social media for most people is a mutual exchange: “like my stuff and I’ll like yours too.” It’s not a genuine interaction, and it can be easily replaced by other people. If you quit social media, you may find that you weren’t missed at all.
*   Don’t announce that you’re leaving – this nurtures the conceit that people will miss you. Just drop off and see what happens. If anyone cares, they’ll get in touch with you another way.
*   If you quit reading news or participating in online flame wars, you may find yourself being more content and that you didn’t miss out on hearing a big announcement a few hours late.

**2) Instead of the Internet, plan another way to spend your time.**

*   Structured hobbies with defined goals are good ways to focus. Example: reading a certain number of books, knitting a scarf.
*   “But isn’t the point of free time to relax and be distracted? How would I recharge without this meandering time?” In reality, Cal Newport argues that the mind _is_ capable of uninterrupted hard activity – all it wants is change, not rest.
*   If you accomplish a goal in your free time, you’ll feel more fulfilled than if you spent hours meandering aimlessly in the Internet. You’ll also begin the next day more relaxed and ready to do deep work.

Rule #3: Constrain Your Distractions

Try to align where you spend your time with your life’s most important goals.

Exercise: Reflect on Your Distractions

So far, we’ve covered practical strategies on how to set up deep work, how to increase your ability to do deep work, and how to avoid critical distractions.

The final chapter of _Deep Work_ covers the last major component of our work life - shallow work. Even if you learn how to engage in deep work, your schedule might still be inundated with shallow work. Eliminating shallow work from your work requirements will let you spend more time in deep work.

### Constrain Your Worktime Each Day and Week

If you’re ambitious and aiming to be productive, you may be tempted to work endless hours each day and week, without much rest.

The pitfall to this mindset is that you can’t spend all those hours on very productive tasks. The most important work is done during deep work, but your capacity is capped at 4 hours per day - and for beginners, even less time.

This means **the marginal hour you spend after deep work is necessarily shallower work**. You can always find more tasks to fill your time with - work expands to fill your time capacity. This doesn’t mean those extra tasks are important.

By the 80-20 rule, **you might still achieve most of your daily potential output even if you constrain your work time per day**. (Shortform suggestion: you might ask yourself, “if I could only work 4 hours a day, how much could I get done? If I added 2 more hours to this, how much more could I get done? Are these extra tasks important?”)

On the other hand, confining your workday will make you happier – you’ll have more time to relax, and you’ll spend less time on unimportant shallow work.

So **set a stopping point for each day when you’ll start your shutdown ritual (see rule #1)**. Then work backwards to figure out productivity strategies to get stuff done.

*   This will effectively set a deadline for yourself. If you work only 8 hours a day, you have no choice but to get all the important things done.
*   This will also push frivolities out of the way, and you’ll realize unimportant tasks have a way of taking care of themselves.

(Business software company Basecamp took this to the extreme by having only 4 workdays during the summer, and allowing a hackathon _month_ where people were free to work on their own projects. “How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to mess around with new ideas? How can we afford not to?”)

### Plan Out Every Minute of Your Day, and Quantify Depth

Now within your fixed workday, **plan out your entire day in half-hour blocks.**

Rationale: When you plan out what you’ll work on in advance, you’ll have a specific goal that will reduce switching to other tasks. You also carve out time for focus, which will train your mental muscles for focus.

First, plan your schedule in half-hour blocks:

*   Per your shutdown procedure, you ideally already know what you should be working on the day before.
*   Schedule some overrun blocks for tasks you suspect might run over, and buffer blocks to handle emergencies that arise.
*   As suggested above, schedule time in advance for when you’ll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.

Then, for each task:

*   Estimate the amount of time each task should take. Be realistic so you don’t break the time deadline significantly, but also give yourself time pressure so you have to work intensely.
*   Estimate the “deep work” complexity of the task. As a rule of thumb, **imagine how long it would take to train a smart college graduate to do the task – the more time, the deeper the work.**
    *   Example: Executing a simpler operational task like an analytics report may just take a week for the college graduate to learn. In contrast, the complex task of researching an industry to find a new business opportunity may take months or years for a graduate to get up to your ability on.
    *   (Shortform caveat: This heuristic doesn’t always work if you’ve built up a skill so strongly that it becomes routine. For instance, a surgeon operating may not consider a procedure deep work.)
*   Look over your schedule. If your task is full of shallow tasks, consider how you can replace those with deeper work.
    *   How much of your schedule should be shallow work? The book suggests a guideline of 30-50% to start. It certainly shouldn’t be the majority of your time, but in most careers you can’t get away with lower.
    *   For beginners to deep work, it’s not surprising for an 8-hour workday to have only 1 hour of real deep work.

To wrap up the day:

*   If time runs out on a task but you have momentum and inspiration, then keep going. After you finish, restructure your day by moving blocks around.
    *   This addresses the complaint that too much structure decreases serendipity. And in reality, structuring time to get into deep work should _increase_ the quantity of good ideas.
*   After each day, review the accuracy of your time blocks. This will help you set more accurate days in the future.

### Set a Budget with Your Boss for Shallow Work

A common barrier to getting more deep work in is the fear that your employer has expectations requiring shallow work (eg email response times).

So have a conversation with your boss about your schedule.

*   Start with the high-level goal – the deep work components of your time generate the most value for the company. Does the boss agree? It’s important that deep work not be seen as an indulgent luxury, but rather as _the best_ place to spend time.
*   Does it make sense to restructure your time to focus on deep work?
*   What are the expectations around shallow work (chats, emails, meetings)? Can you restructure your time to minimize those while still servicing the rest of the team?

Once people know that you’ll be spending more of your time in deep work, they’ll adjust their expectations in kind.

### Learn to Say No to Shallow Work

You’ll be invited/coerced into doing work that is shallow – meetings, committees, travel.

Say no to these things by **providing a vague enough response that the requester cannot work around it**. Example: “Sounds interesting, but I can’t make it because of schedule conflicts.”

You might feel bad, but avoid giving a consolation prize, like “I can’t join the committee, but I’m happy to look at requests as they come along.” This just inserts more shallow work that you don’t want to do anyway.

### Request Emails Be Thoughtful, and Respond Thoughtfully

Emails are an insidious time suck. People want to dash them off as quickly as possible, hoping to push the responsibility off on someone else. The nightmare email thread is one where multiple parties spend dozens of emails scheduling a meeting time.

Here are a few ways to reduce unproductive emails.

**1) Publish a policy on how you’ll handle incoming emails, and which emails you’ll reject.** “Please only send things that would interest me. I may not reply unless it’s a good fit for my schedule and interests.”

*   By publicizing the fact that you may not respond at all, you give yourself the mental freedom to ignore the emails and not reply to any. This is very freeing.
*   While you might worry you’ll sound rude, consider that the sending person likely hopes for the same courtesy for her own incoming emails. So it might not be rude after all.
*   Much of this is also based on the ego that people care what you have to say and are pining for a response. In reality, most email senders may not care that they get a response at all.

**2) When replying to an email, articulate the current state of things, where the ultimate goal is, and what the most effective next steps are.**

Rationale: This prevents unproductive email volleys, where each email adds incremental information at the cost of distractions for multiple people. It also closes the mental loop for you, preventing mental residue from accumulating.

Examples:

*   Bad reply: “Here’s the edited draft. Thoughts?”
*   Good reply: “I’ve reviewed your draft, added major comments, and made line edits for specific language. Things are looking good – you’re free to take this to the final draft without running it by me again.“
*   Bad reply: “Yes, let’s get a coffee sometime. When works for you?”
*   Good reply: “Here are times over the next week when I’m available. If any of these work for you, let me know and please send a calendar invite. If none of these work, please send over a few times that do.”
*   Bad reply: “Where were we on that research question?”
*   Good reply: “In the next week, send me your notes of everything we discussed about the project. I’ll combine it with my own notes, put them in a shared doc, and highlight the most promising next steps. Then let’s meet to discuss the problem – here are six times when I’m available.”

At first, writing each email will take you more time, but you save many more minutes in the future by cutting email volleys down.

**3) Consider not replying at all to less thoughtful emails, or emails where no reply would not be a bad thing.** If it’s important enough, they’ll respond, hopefully with a more thoughtful email.

*   Principle (from Tim Ferriss): “Let small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”

Rule #4: Cut Out Shallow Work

Take command of your schedule and reduce meaningless shallow work.

Exercise: Reducing Shallow Work

The book suggests planning out your day in half-hour blocks. This will 1) help you focus on a single task without switching, 2) carve out time for deep work, 3) confine distraction time to specific periods. You can complete this checklist with your favorite calendar app.

*   Make a list of tasks you need to finish in the day.
*   Schedule time for each task to the nearest half-hour. Be realistic, but also set a challenging deadline to force focus.
*   Schedule time in advance for when you'll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.
*   Schedule overrun blocks for tasks you suspect might run overtime.
*   Look over your schedule. If you have lots of shallow tasks (more than 30-50% time), consider how you can replace these with deeper work.
*   During the day, if you have momentum on a task or feel particularly inspired, keep going. After you're done, reorganize your schedule.
*   At the end of the day, review the accuracy of your time blocks.
*   Reflect: how well did you focus during the day? How could you focus better tomorrow?

Checklist: Planning Your Day in 30-Minute Chunks

Try to end each workday with a shutdown procedure like this one. By clearly stopping work, you’ll free your mind to relax.

---

*   Check your emails for any last urgent items.
*   Update your todo list of unfinished items.
*   Make sure every item in your todo list is scheduled to be done at some point.
*   Look through your calendar to make sure there aren’t important deadlines you forgot.
*   Make a todo list of tasks tomorrow.
*   Say “shutdown complete” to explicitly mark the end of work.

Checklist: End-of-Day Shutdown

Deep Work

Many cultures, particularly Western ones, place a lot of emphasis on intelligence as a barometer of success. We’ve even developed tests to measure our intelligence, resulting in a score known as our intelligence quotient, or IQ. But data suggests that **IQ only accounts for about 20% of success in life, with the remaining 80% being made up by other factors, emotional intelligence included.** And much more research has been done on IQ than on emotions and emotional intelligence, despite the fact that emotions are hard-wired in the human brain and make us the species we are.

IQ is fixed: what we’re born with is what remains throughout our lives. But **emotional intelligence can be taught and learned -- we have the ability to improve upon our emotional intelligence throughout our lives.** In this one-page summary, we cover a broad overview of what emotions are, what emotional intelligence is, and how we can use it in a couple different areas of life. The full summary goes into much more detail about each of these categories.

### Emotions

#### What Are They

Emotions are strong impulses that urge us to take immediate action. They’re based on fundamental needs (usually survival), and neurologically **designed to propel us into action without overthinking**: “run from the tiger before considering options gets us killed!”

**There’s nothing wrong with feeling emotions** -- the problems arise when the emotions are out of tune with the situation and when we don’t express our emotions productively or safely.

#### The Science Behind Them

The human brain was built from the bottom up:

*   The brainstem is responsible for all our basic necessary functions (breathing, eating, sleeping).
*   The limbic system built on the brainstem, and this system is responsible for our basic emotions. It also gave us the ability to learn things and remember them, which allowed us to adapt to new environments.
*   Then our neocortex formed on top of the limbic system, and this is our rational mind. This gives us the ability to choose how we respond to our emotions, reflect on our actions, and feel empathy for other people.

**We essentially have two minds: a thinking one and a feeling one.** Our feeling mind is associative, categorical, absolutist, and individual -- and it reacts to information before our thinking mind even gets all the information and has an opportunity to weigh out the best action.

Our feeling mind is more fully-formed at birth, while our neocortex can learn, change, and adjust throughout our lives. This means our emotional reactions to things are formed before we have high-level thoughts to make sense of them. **We can’t change our emotional reactions to things, but we can learn how to respond to our emotions differently.**

_Emotional hijackings_ occur when our limbic system receives the information first and responds with an emergency alert. This sends our body into panic mode and makes it more difficult for our neocortex to control the actions we take based on our emotional impulses.

### Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence encompasses the following skills:

*   Knowing your emotions.
*   Managing emotions.
*   Motivating yourself.
*   Recognizing emotions in others (empathy).
*   Handling relationships.

#### Knowing Your Emotions

**Self-awareness is the ability to recognize a feeling as it’s happening to you.** Being able to monitor our feelings as they’re occurring helps us understand ourselves and our psychology. **The more certain we are about our feelings, the easier it is to make personal decisions.**

People who know their emotions are aware of their moods as they happen but can be mindful about how they deal with them. They’re more sure of their boundaries since they know how they’ll feel. They tend towards a positive outlook on life since they know they can manage whatever moods are thrown at them. They don’t dwell on bad moods and can get out of ruts faster. They can be mindful of their emotions and manage them successfully.

The goal is to be self-aware in relation to our emotions, but most people deal with their emotions in one of two unhealthy ways:

*   **Engulfed**. People who deal with emotions this way aren’t aware of what’s happening to them. Their moods shift often and overpower them. They do little to change their feelings, and feel out of control often.
*   **Accepting**. These people are more clear on what they’re feeling, but they also don’t feel like anything needs to change. They’re either in good moods, so they don’t have any motivation to change their moods, or they’re in bad moods but are resigned to feeling like there’s nothing they can do about it.

#### Managing Emotions

Once we’re aware of our emotional responses as we’re having them, we can start to regulate how they influence our actions.

There are 3 emotions that most people find hard to regulate: anger, anxiety, and sadness.

*   We get angry when we feel attacked. The worst thing you can do for anger is dwell on it. Instead, try challenging the assumptions that are making you angry, physically cooling off with exercise or distraction, using relaxation techniques, or writing down your angry thoughts to reflect on them.
*   Anxiety is a form of worrying, a kind of rehearsal of what could go wrong and potential ways we might deal with it. Relaxation techniques can help anxiety, and challenging the anxiety by asking realistic questions (like “Does it actually help to go through these thoughts over and over again?”).
*   Sadness is usually the mood people want to change the most, but they do it in ways that can worsen the sadness: isolating themselves, or dwelling on the sadness under the guise of analyzing it. Try challenging the sad thoughts to find a positive spin on them, scheduling pleasant distractions, or engineering small successes for yourself.

#### Motivating Yourself

We also need to be able to delay gratification and overcome our impulses to be more productive and effective -- this is where motivation, the ability to push ourselves to do something, comes in. Being able to manage our emotions is the first step to motivating ourselves to finish tasks and achieve goals.

Motivation mostly has to do with what you _believe_ about your own abilities. People who are good self-motivators:

*   View themselves as resourceful and try different ways to accomplish their goals.
*   Tell themselves it will get better when times are tough.
*   Try different approaches towards reaching their goal or switch goals if one proves too difficult to achieve.
*   Break down large, scary tasks into smaller, more manageable goals.

#### Empathy

**Empathy is the fundamental people skill**, allowing us to interpret what others want or need. Empathy changes the way you look at the world: when other people are in pain, you work to understand their pain and help them through it. You also work not to cause people pain: this is where morals and morality begin. **Empathy makes you a better person.**

**Our most basic emotional life lessons are laid down in small, repeated life exchanges between us and our parents.** How our parents responded to our emotions is how we respond to others’, and shapes our capacity for empathy and the emotional expectations we bring into our adult relationships. Treating children with empathy creates more empathetic adults in the future.

#### Relationships

The culmination of all the previous skills combined, when we recognize our own emotions, manage them, motivate ourselves to do better, and can empathize with others, our personal relationships are bound to improve.

The ability to manage relationships breaks down into 4 distinct and separate abilities:

*   _Organizing groups_. An essential skill for leaders, this is the ability to initiate and coordinate the energy and efforts of a group of people.
*   _Negotiating solutions._ This skill involves avoiding or resolving conflicts.
*   _Personal connection_. Empathizing and connecting are the heart of this skill.
*   _Social analysis_. This skill involves detecting and intuiting the emotions, motivations, and concerns of other people.

### Using Emotional Intelligence

#### In Romantic Relationships

Relationship strife usually has to do with partners having differing expectations about how emotions will be handled. **Agreeing how to disagree or confront each other is the key to a successful relationship.**

Here are some things couples can do to improve their emotional intelligence in arguments:

*   **Stick to one topic.** Keep the argument focused on the specific incident.
*   **Use the XYZ formula.** X is the action, Y is how it made you feel, Z is what you’d prefer they did next time.
*   **Give each person a chance to explain their perspective at the forefront.**
*   **Show your partner you’re listening.** Most people in the throes of any emotional distress just want to be heard and understood.
*   **Learn how to soothe yourself first.** It’ll be easier to deal with your partner’s emotions.
*   **Challenge toxic thoughts.** Intentionally remind yourself of all the good times or all the times your partner did what you want them to do more of.
*   **Don’t get defensive.** What feels like an attack to you is really just your partner having strong feelings about this issue and wanting to improve it.
*   **Validate your partner.** Articulate to your partner that you can see things from their point of view and that their perspective is valid.
*   **Take responsibility or apologize if you’re in the wrong**. A simple and honest apology can go a long way to smoothing over the worst disputes.
*   **Agree on a time-out.** Agree on a phrase or method of calling the time-out that both partners will recognize, and then actually use the cooling off time to cool off.

#### In Families

**Parents who are emotionally intelligent set better examples for their children.** If you want a better life for your kid, work on improving yours first.

3 common difficult situations parents have to deal with are: angry kids, depressed kids, and kids with eating disorders.

*   Angry kids are at risk of becoming bullies or social outcasts. They usually perceive threats where there are none (and they most likely learned it from you).
*   Depressed kids usually have trouble socializing and bouncing back from setbacks.
*   Eating disorders stem from misinterpreting overwhelming emotions as signs of hunger, or misguidedly attempting to take control of emotions by controlling food intake.

**Parents who address emotions healthily:**

*   Take their kid’s feelings seriously and try to understand them.
*   View emotional moments as opportunities to coach their kids through what to do.
*   Offer up positive ways to deal with emotional reactions.
*   Practice these three steps in relation to their own emotional moments as well.

#### At Work

**Issues at work usually arise from prejudice in the workplace or friction among employees who have to work together.**

Prejudices are any preconceived opinions that are not based on experience or fact, but we see this most commonly in discrimation against other races, genders, sexualities, or classes. Prejudices are passed down from our parents and taught to us emotionally before we understand the logic behind them. It’s nearly impossible to change your own prejudices or anyone else’s on a neurological level -- but it is possible for a workplace to suppress the expression of prejudice for the sake of a healthier and better-functioning workplace.

Friction among employees usually stems from low group IQ, or low emotional intelligence. People with high emotional intelligence are better at working together.

To combat both of these situations, **managers must be good at both giving feedback and receiving it.** Here’s how:

*   Give feedback early, before the problem has gotten bigger.
*   **Give praise first**. **Keep it specific.** **Offer solutions.** **Do it face to face, if possible, and be present.** **Use empathy.**

When receiving feedback, remember that **feedback is a tool to help you improve, and an opportunity for you to work with your manager to do your job better.**

#### In School

Family life doesn’t necessarily offer the same connections and instruction it once did, so schools have become the one place communities can depend on to educate their children and correct their behaviors.

**High anxiety and emotional distress take a devastating toll on student performance.** Emotionally distressed students have a harder time focusing, following through, controlling their behavior, and making friends.

**Schools and teachers can do a few things to help combat the low emotional literacy of students:**

*   Introduce emotional intelligence training early in and throughout education.
*   Integrate emotional intelligence education into already-existing curriculum and subjects (like doing a unit on good study habits i.e. self-motivation in math, or reading stories in English and discussing empathy).
*   Adjust the protocol for disciplining students. Remember, children are learning all the time. Disciplinary incidents are an opportunity to teach children healthy emotional intelligence habits, not reinforce bad ones (like letting your emotions control you or ignoring how the other person feels).

#### In Health

**Emotions are deeply connected to sickness and health.** For the most emotionally healthy population, emotional interventions should be routine practice in any hospital or doctor’s office.

3 emotions have extremely detrimental effects on health: anger, anxiety, and depression.

*   Anger reduces your heart’s pumping efficiency. While it can’t cause heart problems, chronic anger has significant correlation to dying younger, and in patients with preexisting heart conditions, chronic anger can be fatal.
*   Anxiety suppresses your immune system, and can make you more vulnerable to infections and disease.
*   Depression negatively interferes with a patient’s ability to recover by affecting their energy or their will to take care of themselves. The symptoms of depression often overlap with the symptoms of other diseases, and many doctors miss depression in patients they’re already treating.

**Medical offices that would like to increase emotional intelligence should:**

*   Give patients reassurance and autonomy by offering more information on diagnoses so patients can make better decisions, and programming that teaches patients how to ask effective questions of their doctor.
*   Address anxiety for presurgery patients through relaxation techniques.
*   Design and build recovery rooms that allow family to care for recovering patients.
*   Put programming in place to increase the emotional intelligence of all staff.

_Emotional Intelligence_ by Daniel Goleman is a tricky book to summarize: it clocks in at 384 pages and is packed full of interesting ideas and information, practical advice, and anecdotes.

Goleman’s career as a psychologist and New York Times reporter on the human brain and behavioral sciences gives him a lot of research to pull from, and the book is chock full of data from academic research studies. We’ve chosen to cut most of those examples due to 2 reasons:

1.  This is already one of our longer summaries just based on information alone.
2.  Goleman recounts most of the studies anecdotally and without rigorous supporting evidence.

Readers who revel in research should consider reading the original book to make use of Goleman’s extensive examples.

We’ve also done some reorganization for this summary: though the rough structure of our summary follows the rough structure of the book, the individual chapters in the original book sometimes meandered or jumped around in ways that could cause a reader to get lost. Much of the useful content in _Emotional Intelligence_ is either scientific information or practical advice, and we’ve generally used that distinction to organize this summary.

### Introduction to the Book

IQ might reflect how smart we are, but it has nothing to do with how we handle our emotional lives. Passions and impulses can derail even those with the highest IQs.

*   In the 1940s, a study followed 95 Harvard students into middle-age. Men with higher IQ test scores were not more successful than students with lower test scores in terms of productivity, status, or salary in their field. And they did not have more life satisfaction than other students either, in regards to personal relationships with friends, family, and romantic partners.

IQ determines how well we can handle cognitive demands -- that’s why it’s good for predicting what job you might be suited for. But, for example, if a company employs a handful of experts within any given field, IQ will not help determine which of those experts will be the most successful. Data suggests that IQ only accounts for about 20% of success in life, with the remaining 80% being made up by other factors, emotional intelligence included.

Emotional intelligence has one major benefit over IQ: IQ is fixed -- what we’re born with is what remains throughout our lives. But **emotional intelligence can be taught and learned -- we have the ability to improve upon our emotional intelligence throughout our lives.** This is the major factor that makes emotional intelligence potentially more important for success than IQ: it’s within our control.

Corporations report that emotional intelligence determines which employees will be better leadership material. Emotional intelligence programs in schools also show definite positive results:

*   Children improve their achievement scores and grade-point averages.
*   Disciplinary incidents decrease, as do necessary punishments.
*   Attendance rates and positive behavior increase.

But research on emotions is sparse, so most people don’t have a good understanding of what’s going on when they have an emotional reaction, or how they can work to control their response to that emotional reaction.

In this summary, we’ll first explore emotions, what they are, and where they come from. Then we’ll delve into emotional intelligence and its benefits. Finally, we’ll look at using emotional intelligence in specific categories.

### What Are They

Emotions are strong impulses that urge us to take immediate action. The root of the word emotion is _motere_, the Latin verb meaning “to move.” Watch children or animals: they act almost immediately upon getting a feeling, before they know what they’re doing.

It’s a widely-held belief that emotions aren’t rational. But passionate emotional responses are designed to overwhelm reason. The more intense the emotion, the more it takes over.

Emotions have developed over centuries of evolutionary history. They’re based on fundamental needs, and **designed to prevent our brain from thinking about tasks that are too important to leave to intellect alone.** Our most powerful emotions want us to:

*   Avoid danger to survive.
*   Suffer loss but survive.
*   Reach a goal despite obstacles, usually to survive.
*   Find a mate and bond with them, for ultimate survival in the form of children.
*   Keep the family alive to ensure survival of genes.

These situations repeated over and over again throughout the history of humankind, and if the reactions kept us alive, then they got embedded more deeply into our systems and became automatic responses. Most of them involve life or death, surviving or perishing. This was useful for our ancient ancestors, but **nowadays most people rarely face life or death scenarios -- yet our emotions still perceive things this way.**

As we became more civilized, society had to develop and implement rules to rein in our emotional reactions, or create consequences for when we could not control our emotions. Humans can’t be expected to control their emotional responses unless there are negative results they understand. And **there’s nothing wrong with feeling emotions**\--the problems arise when the emotions are out of tune with the situation and when we don’t express our emotions productively or safely.

### The Science Behind Emotions

The development of the human brain -- both evolutionarily and in our biological development from conception to old age -- reflects the hierarchy between our emotional mind and our rational mind.

**The human brain essentially grew from the bottom up.** We share the primitive part of our brain -- the brainstem -- with all species who have more than a simple nervous system, and this part of the brain controls our basic and necessary functions: breathing, the metabolism of our organs, preprogrammed reactions and movements such as shrinking from pain.

**From the brainstem emerged the emotional center, our limbic system, which refined two important skills: the ability to learn and the ability to remember.** This development allowed us to make conscious decisions in relation to our environment and smarter choices for survival.

**From the emotional center emerged the rational mind,** our neocortex. This part of the human brain is three times as large as the neocortex of our evolutionary next of kin, nonhuman primates. The neocortex also contributes to a more complex emotional life: it’s the reason we can have _feelings_ _about our feelings_.

**This development explains why emotions can supercede our rationality -- they’re more or less second in command in our brains.** The emotional brain is quick to respond but sloppy. First we have feelings; second, thoughts.

*   Emotions _can_ come after thoughts, but this is a slower process happening in the brain: as we take in stimuli, our rational mind reflecting on the input leads to conclusions that spark an emotional reaction. For example, you get into a cab and know the general direction you’re heading -- but the driver heads off in a different direction. You observe for a few minutes and come to the conclusion “this driver is swindling me”--and _then_ you get angry.

### Two Minds in One

**We essentially have two minds: a thinking one and a feeling one.**

Our thinking mind is our rational mind, and for us modern humans this is the one we’re usually more aware of: we can observe our thoughts, reflect on our choices, and we can be aware of our thinking.

Our emotional mind, however, starts off more powerful than our rational brain. It’s impulsive and strong, and sometimes irrational. It’s also been neglected by research and exploration up until the recent past, so we know far less about it.

The emotional brain is:

*   **Associative**. It triggers memories based on symbolic elements instead of literal elements. This means objective realities make little difference to the emotional brain: what matters is how the emotional brain _perceives_ things. This is also why humans make and appreciate art.
*   **Categorical**. It looks at the world with a black and white mentality and has a perception bias around oneself. It’s also self-confirming, highlighting facts and memories that support its beliefs and disregarding ones that don’t.
*   **Absolutist**. The rational brain can have its opinion changed, but the emotional brain takes its current beliefs to be absolutely true.
*   **Individual**. For each person, each emotion has its own pattern of thoughts, reactions, and memories. Not everyone feels sad about the same things, and people who feel sad about the same things experience it in different ways: if two people both had rough childhoods, they experience different emotions depending on what the stressors were.

Chapter 1: Introduction to Emotions

Have you ever looked back on an emotional response you had and thought, “I don’t know what came over me!” This is what Goleman would refer to as a **limbic or emotional hijacking, where the emotional center of your brain takes over without notice.** We usually associate it with negative emotions, but it can be positive, too -- if you’ve ever laughed uncontrollably and felt like you couldn’t stop, that’s a hijacking.

Research shows that **we unconsciously understand what something is and make a value judgement as to whether it’s a good or bad thing in the first few _milliseconds_ of perceiving it.**

*   When people who are afraid of snakes are shown photos of snakes, their skin breaks out in sweat even if they say they aren’t afraid. Their skin still does this even if the photos are flashed so quickly they don’t register they’ve seen it.

This has to do with how the brain is set up, and the balance between the epicenters of our two minds: the amygdala (the center of emotions) and the neocortex (the center of reason).

### The Amygdala

There are two amygdalas on either side of the brainstem, at the base of the limbic system. The amygdala is the command center of our emotions, responsible for interpreting emotional signals and for storing our emotional memory. The human amygdala is much larger than the amygdala in our closest relatives, nonhuman primates. Animals and humans who’ve suffered damage to or the severing of their amygdalas completely lose the ability to feel emotion or understand emotion in others.

The amygdala is constantly on the lookout for danger or dislike -- for negative emotional content. **If it perceives a threat to our emotional health or physical safety, it reacts instantaneously and sends a crisis message out to the entire brain.**

The brain is set up so that sensory information from the eye or ear goes first to the amygdala and then to the neocortex, meaning the amygdala can respond while the neocortex is putting the information through several levels of consideration. And since the amygdala is also the center of emotional memory, this is why traumatic emotional responses can stick with us even when we aren’t aware we have them. The more intense the signals sent to the amygdala, the stronger the amygdala imprints the memory. (Shortform note: We discuss trauma more in-depth in the next section.)

Once the amygdala has an emotional memory of a certain situation, any new situation that resembles the old one will trigger the amygdala’s stress response, whether the situations are ultimately similar or not. For instance, this is why many adults who got bit by a dog when they were kids still fear dogs: though it’s not the same dog and though the person might not be in any danger of getting bit, the amygdala triggers the same emotional response to the sight of _any_ remotely similar dog.

The amygdala is already close to being fully formed at birth, while our neocortex is not. This means our rational mind has more time to change and develop, but our emotional mind is solidified at a very young age: **many of our strongest emotional memories occur in the first few years of our lives when we have not developed language or logic to understand them or process them.**

So our childhood experiences deeply influence our emotional wellbeing as adults. Though many people believe that infants or children won’t remember what happened, this is not true: though they might not be able to recall exactly what happened, they will always carry with them how their experiences made them feel. Our childhood emotional experiences and how our parents respond to them lay the blueprint for how we respond to emotional experiences as adults -- and the more traumatic the experience, such as physical abuse or emotional neglect, the more they affect our ability to be emotionally healthy adults.

### The Neocortex

There’s a moderator for the amygdala at the other end of the neocortex, in the prefrontal lobe just behind the forehead. This area regulates emotional responses, quells feelings in order to think more rationally about the situation at hand, and recalls the appropriate response if the amygdala analyzes the situation wrong.

*   (Shortform note: Like a surprise party -- when the lights flip on and everyone shouts, the person being surprised is under the sway of their amygdala -- they’re afraid. But then the prefrontal lobe assesses the situation and brings up the appropriate response: happiness at seeing their loved ones gathered in celebration. If the prefrontal lobe didn’t take control, the surprised person would probably take off out the door or start fighting the party guests.)
*   This is also why medical science believed that lobotomies were the cure-all for many mental conditions: severing the prefrontal lobe from the rest of the brain cuts off a patient’s emotional response, and relieves any mental distress. However, the cost of this “solution” was that patients’ emotional lives disappeared entirely, since the emotional circuitry had been destroyed.

The prefrontal cortex also contains our working memory -- the facts we need to complete a certain task or solve a certain problem. However, due to the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, **if our amygdala is sending out signals of strong emotion, it creates something similar to static in our prefrontal cortex, and it interferes with our working memory and ability to complete tasks.**

The connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex also explains why **prolonged emotional distress has devastating effects on a child’s ability to learn** (emotional overload severely hinders their working memory needed to learn and perform well in school).

*   Circling back to IQ, one study found that students with above-average IQs still did poorly in school if they were under emotional duress -- it impaired the functioning of their frontal cortex. Their poor performance had nothing to do with how “smart” they were.

There are lots of cliché sayings about the head versus the heart, but using the two in tandem actually results in the most success. **Feelings actually help us make rational decisions by pointing us in the right general direction first, so we can then use logic to make the best decision in that direction.**

> **Shortform example**: You have a secure job but it’s not in a field that interests you. Is it more logical to keep the secure job that you don’t have any passion for, or switch to a new job that’s riskier but keeps you engaged?
> 
> Logic can’t actually answer this question for you. Using only logic to make this decision will send you round and round without an answer. It might seem more logical to keep the secure job, except logic would also tell us that if it doesn’t interest you, you probably won’t do it well, and you risk losing the secure job due to performance. And logic probably balks at the idea of giving up security for a riskier job that keeps your attention -- except logic would also confirm that a job that keeps you engaged will improve your performance, thus increasing your potential for high earnings and better job satisfaction.
> 
> Emotions can help you determine which is a better choice for you: maybe you have children, and the thought of them having to forego Christmas presents because you quit your job makes you feel too sad to consider quitting; or maybe you feel a strong emotional drive to teach them that they should do the things that make them happy, and want to lead by example. These are emotional influences that point you in the right direction.

Chapter 2: Emotional Hijackings

Emotional reactions can feel very different to us, based on how long they last, how intense they are, and how they affect our bodies.

### Emotional Phases

Goleman describes 4 different phases of emotional response: impulses, moods, temperaments, and on the extreme end, chronic disorders. We can distinguish between these phases primarily based on how long they last.

**Emotional impulses are strong and immediate, but only last a few seconds.** These are the knee-jerk reactions that happen before our conscious mind understands what’s going on. (Shortform note: Think of “crimes of passion”--most of them were probably committed in these few, brief seconds where the emotional mind is in complete control.)

**Moods are muted forms of emotions and last for much longer than the immediate emotional impulse.** You’ve probably never been in a full, terrifying rage for a whole day -- but you might have been grumpy all day, where normal things make you angry that much faster. That’s a mood.

Then, there’s temperaments. Goleman suggests that **temperaments are a product of nature, a predisposition from birth based on brain activity patterns**, and that **people generally fall into one of four temperaments: timid, bold, upbeat, and melancholy.**

*   **Timid people** have amygdalas that are more responsive to even low-level stress. They avoid new or unfamiliar situations and dislike uncertainty.
*   **Bold people** have a higher threshold for arousal, and can withstand more stress and uncertainty. They don’t scare easily, have no trouble meeting people, and seek out new things.
*   **Upbeat people** have more activity in their left frontal lobes than their right. These people enjoy meeting others and seeing what life brings, and rally quicker after setbacks.
*   **Melancholic people** have more activity in their right frontal lobes. They’re more frequently in bad moods and generally take a negative view of life. Because they have a hard time avoiding anxiety and depression, they are more easily defeated by difficulty.
*   (Shortform note: Goleman touches on this very briefly, and does not address some basic questions about them, such as whether they’re genetic or can be influenced by early interactions, or whether people can be combinations of the four.)

Finally, **chronic disorders occur when someone is trapped in a negative temperament or mood and most likely needs medication or therapy to help balance their emotions.**

### Physiological Symptoms

Different emotions cause different reactions in the body, usually in preparation for whatever the emotion might make us do:

*   When we’re angry: blood flows to our hands so we can grab a weapon easier or hit someone; our heart rate increases in preparation for a fight; adrenaline courses through our body to pump us up.
*   When we’re afraid: blood goes away from our face (thus the “white as a sheet” cliché) to our legs and arms so we can run or fight; our bodies freeze up to see if hiding will work, or to be able to hear better without the sound of our own movement; hormones flood our system that put us on red alert.
*   When we’re happy: increased activity in our brain center inhibits negative feelings and increases our energy; our bodies relax.
*   In love: we experience a parasympathetic arousal -- that is, a general state of calm and contentment, the opposite of fight or flight, that makes us want to stay where we are and cooperate with our partners.
*   When we’re surprised, our eyebrows fly up, opening our eyes wider to take in more visual information.
*   Disgust elicits the same response in people around the world: the curling of the upper lip and the wrinkling of the nose might have been to close our nostrils to whatever bad smell we encountered, or might have been preparation to spit out whatever bad food we were eating.
*   Sadness causes a significant drop in our energy, slows our metabolism, and creates an aversion to pleasant things -- essentially, our body forces us to mourn and take time to adjust to whatever loss we’ve experienced.

Chapter 3: Phases and Physiological Symptoms of Emotions

**PTSD occurs when the brain has lowered its setpoint for alarm due to traumatic experiences**, making emergencies out of anything remotely resembling either a single, impactful traumatic event or prolonged periods of suffering cruelties.

PTSD also generally stems from **traumatic events in which the victim felt helpless**. The helplessness is part of what makes the initial traumatic event so overwhelming to the limbic system -- it increases the strength of the emotion because the brain feels like there’s no action to take.

**Here’s how PTSD affects the brain:**

*   Key changes in a brain affected by PTSD happen in a structure that regulates adrenaline and noradrenaline, which are emergency hormones. This system turns hyperactive in PTSD, releasing extremely large doses of those hormones in situations that pose little to no threat to the person but resemble the traumatic event.
*   But not only does the brain go into hyperactive threat mode as a result of PTSD, the opioid system in the brain _also_ becomes hyperactive. In a healthy brain, the opioid system secretes endorphins to dull any feelings of pain. When this system goes into overdrive, not only does it dull feelings of pain, but also of pleasure, and emotion in general. This creates the numbness and emotional distance that many PTSD victims feel.
*   These two changes together seem to increase the likelihood that a person will be further traumatized, since the changes increase the number of emergency alerts while decreasing any positive feeling or connection to the outside world that might offset the emergency.

### Recovery from Trauma

But we can learn to handle our emotions better, as we already know, and PTSD victims can, with treatment, relearn a different, more normal response to their specific triggers. **The amygdala will always retain its response to that initial emergency alert, but victims can work on developing an ability to suppress the emergency alert through their rational mind.**

Trauma sticks on an unconscious level, so a great way to work through trauma is through art, which also deals with the unconscious. (Shortform note: Goleman does not go into detail as to how art can be used in therapy for this purpose, but there are plenty of good books out there on art and drama as therapeutic techniques.)

Children have an easier time relearning responses to traumatic events. Because their brains are still forming, they can use a wider variety of tools to relearn responses -- tools like games, dreams, fantasy, and play.

*   In 1989, Patrick Purdy, a white supremacist with a criminal record, opened fire with an automatic weapon on Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, CA. He killed 5 children and wounded 30 others, then shot himself in the head. Children who had survived the attack began playing a recess game called “Purdy,” where one student would be Purdy and try to kill the other students. Sometimes “Purdy” would kill everybody; sometimes the others would kill “Purdy.”
*   This game allowed the survivors to replay the event safely, repeating the traumatic event in a low-anxiety setting and desensitizing themselves to it. It also allowed them to change the outcome of the tragedy, giving them a sense of control over the event instead of the helplessness they felt at the time.

**There are 3 stages of recovering from trauma:**

1.  **Regaining a sense of safety.**
    *   This stage is about calming the triggered emotional circuits enough to be _able_ to relearn a response.
    *   PTSD victims, during the traumatic event and in the episodes after, feel as though they are not in control of their emotions or bodies -- so ideally, patients would find a way to regain a sense of control over what is currently happening to them. Medication can help in this arena -- antidepressants help control the activation of the sympathetic nervous system.
    *   Relaxation techniques are another good tactic, allowing patients to counter the anxiety and agitation of triggered emotional circuits and find a sense of safety.
2.  **Reviewing the details of the trauma and mourning the loss it resulted in.**
    *   Retelling or revisiting the traumatic event in great detail in a safe environment allows patients to come to a more realistic understanding of the memory, as well as their response to it. Therapy helps them do this.
    *   Putting memories into words is, in a sense, gaining control over them and transferring them from the feeling system to the thinking system.
    *   Mentally reliving the traumatic event in a safe environment can teach the brain that those two things -- safety and the traumatic event -- can happen at the same time.
    *   Trauma always results in loss, so mourning is necessary. Mourning any loss is about acknowledging why that person or thing was important, and beginning to let go of the lost thing. Mourning in relation to a traumatic event can help to let go of the trauma itself.
3.  **Reestablishing a more normal life.**
    *   Once a patient has reduced their physiological symptoms, feels more in control of how they respond to it, and can revisit the traumatic memory voluntarily or put it aside if they choose to, then the patient can start to rebuild their life and reinvest in strong relationships built on trust.

**Once we’ve learned an emotional response to something, the emotion hardly ever changes or goes away -- but we can learn to control that emotion and how we let it affect our actions.**

This is why people have patterns that show up regardless of the situation -- for instance, if we feel emotionally neglected by our parents and learn to hide our emotions to avoid the feeling of rejection, then as adults we will respond to any perceived neglect by hiding our emotions, whether the person neglecting our feelings is our boss, our spouse, or our children.

If PTSD patients can relearn their responses to traumatic events, than people with less intense but still impactful negative memories can also relearn how to respond. Psychotherapy can help in both instances.

*   In one study, psychotherapy was just as effective as Prozac in treating patients with obsessive compulsive disorders -- both sets of PET scans showed a significant decrease in activity in the emotional center of the brain.

Chapter 4: Trauma and the Brain

It’s useful to know what your default temperament is so that you can appreciate it or work against it when necessary. Use this exercise to explore your default mood and how it affects your life.

Exercise: Identifying Your Temperament

Now that we know what emotions are, we’ll discuss emotional intelligence, break it down into 5 key skills, and then review those skills in greater detail. For clarity, each of the chapters will be numbered as 5-1, 5-2, and so on, to denote their relation to the major subject of emotional intelligence.

**Emotional intelligence encompasses the 5 following skills:**

*   Knowing your emotions.
*   Managing emotions, specifically negative ones like anger, anxiety, and sadness.
*   Motivating yourself.
*   Recognizing emotions in others, or empathy.
*   Handling relationships.

Someone with high emotional intelligence can regulate her moods, control her impulses, motivate herself, empathize with others, and hope, within reason, that things will turn out all right. **Emotional intelligence is really a _meta-ability_**, an ability that determines how well we can put all our other abilities to use, including IQ.

### Identifying Your Emotions

Knowing your emotions is really a form of self-awareness. **Self-awareness is the ability to recognize a feeling as it’s happening to you.** Being able to monitor our feelings as they’re occurring helps us understand ourselves and our psychology. Failure to understand our emotional responses leaves us at their mercy. **The more certain we are about our feelings, the easier it is to make personal decisions.**

Even mild shifts in mood can change the way we make decisions. Making decisions in a good mood creates a perceptual bias that makes us more positive in our thinking -- in other words, making decisions when you’re happy leads to happier decisions. And the opposite is true, too: making decisions when we’re in a bad mood leads to more negative thinking -- you’ll make worse, more negative decisions when you’re in a worse mood.

Being aware of our feelings essentially means we can mentally take a step back from what we’re feeling and observe it, instead of act on it right away. Though being aware of our feelings doesn’t guarantee we can _change_ what we’re feeling, the two usually go together. Recognizing you’re in a bad mood usually means you’d like to get out of it.

**Don’t equate self-awareness with a “Stop that!” mentality.** Balance is the goal for emotions, not suppression. All feelings have importance and value. We just want to make sure our emotions match the situation at hand, and that we can control them when they get in the way of what we want to achieve.

*   When a child hits another child out of anger, yelling “Stop that!” at them might stop the action, but it won’t stop the feeling: the angry child will still be angry. Awareness would be a response more like: “You’re hitting them out of anger. It’s okay to be angry, but it’s not okay to hit people. Why are you angry, and what else can we do about it?”

**There are 3 general styles for dealing with emotions:**

*   **Self-aware**. This is the preferable style of dealing with emotions. These people are aware of their moods as they happen but can be mindful about how they deal with them. They’re more sure of their boundaries since they know how they’ll feel. They tend towards a positive outlook on life since they know they can manage whatever moods are thrown at them. They don’t dwell on bad moods and can get out of ruts faster. They can be mindful of their emotions and manage them successfully.
*   **Engulfed**. People who deal with emotions this way generally feel lost and overwhelmed inside their emotional responses. They aren’t aware of what’s happening to them. Their moods shift often and overpower them. They do little to change their feelings, and feel out of control often.
*   **Accepting**. These people are more clear on what they’re feeling, but they also don’t feel like anything needs to change. Usually this category falls into two smaller categories: people who are usually in good moods, so they don’t have any motivation to change their moods, or people who are usually in bad moods but are resigned to feeling like there’s nothing they can do about it, so they might as well accept it.

The goal is to be self-aware. But **how can you tell if you fall into one of the other categories?**

The book gives an example to help you figure it out. Imagine you’re on a flight. The pilot makes an announcement on the intercom that there’s turbulence ahead and everyone needs to return to their seats and fasten their seatbelts. The plane hits this turbulence and it’s the roughest you’ve ever experienced -- the plane is getting tossed around like a beach ball on the waves. What do you do?

*   Are you the kind of person who buries themselves in a book, magazine, or movie, tuning out the turbulence and assuming it’ll be fine?
*   Or do you anxiously review all the emergency protocols, watch the flight attendants to see if they’re panicking, obsessively listen to the plane to see if you can hear something go wrong?

If you fall into the first category, you deal with emotions by accepting them. If you fall into the second category, you get engulfed by your emotions.

As you become more self-aware of your emotions, you’ll discover that what once felt like anger might actually be a different, subtler feeling. Part of knowing your emotions is **increasing your emotional vocabulary-**\-words you use to specifically identify what you’re feeling. Goleman provides some useful words to increase your emotional vocabulary:

*   Anger could also be: outrage, exasperation, annoyance, or violence.
*   Sadness could also be: cheerlessness, self-pity, or despair.
*   Fear could also be: concern, misgiving, or edginess.
*   Enjoyment could also be: relief, pride, sensual pleasure, or mania.
*   Love could also be: acceptance, trust, or kindness.
*   Surprise could also be: shock, amazement, or wonder.
*   Disgust could also be: contempt or disdain.
*   Shame could also be: guilt, humiliation, or contrition.

There are obviously more emotions than listed here, but this is a good starting place to start to expand your emotional vocabulary.

Chapter 5-1: Identifying Your Emotions

**Once we are aware of our emotional responses as we’re having them, we can start to regulate them**, working past emotions when they’re not appropriate to the situation, soothing ourselves when we’re experiencing negative emotions, and bouncing back quickly from setbacks. People who cannot manage their emotions expend a lot of energy fighting their emotional reactions.

**There are 3 main emotions that are difficult to manage: anger, anxiety, and sadness.**

Here are general rules for managing any negative emotion:

1.  **Don’t dwell on the emotion and keep mulling it over.** Ruminating on an emotion doesn’t manage it -- it actually extends the emotional reaction and can even increase the emotional distress.
2.  Self-awareness helps you **catch a negative emotional response early** and identify it correctly.
3.  Most negative emotional responses are built on thoughts or assumptions that confirm the response -- so you can manage almost any negative emotional response by **challenging the thoughts and assumptions** that made you feel it in the first place.

.

### Anger

#### What It Is

**We get angry when we feel attacked**. It could be someone actively threatening our physical safety, dangerously cutting us off on the road, insulting us with words, or it could be something frustrating us in our pursuit of a goal. All these are perceived forms of attack, and anger is our brain preparing us to fight.

We’re also more prone to get angry when we’re more stressed. It’s much easier to shrug things off when your day is going well; if your day is going poorly, little things that might not even get to you on a good day can easily set off your temper.

#### How Not to Manage Anger

The quickest way to continue feeling angry is to dwell on what’s making you angry. The longer we think about our anger, the more our brain comes up with self-justifications and good reasons that we should feel angry. Anger builds on anger.

Say someone dangerously cuts you off while driving and you get angry. “What was that person thinking? They could have killed me. What would happen to my kids if I died? That person could have ruined my life and the lives of the people I care about! And for what? Probably for nothing. Where they’re going isn’t important enough to kill people for it. Jeez, no one pays attention to anyone but themselves anymore…”

Every subsequent angry thought after the initial one fans the flames, keeping you angry and sometimes even increasing how angry you are.

#### How to Manage Anger

The quickest way to undermine anger is to **undermine the assumptions that are making you angry** in the first place, usually by reframing the situation in a more positive light.

*   For example, someone cuts you off in your car: the anger-inducing assumption might be that that person cares more about where they’re going than your safety, or that they chose you specifically to cut off, or even that they’re trying to anger you. You could try reframing your assumptions to curb your anger: maybe they didn’t see you, maybe there’s an emergency and they need to get somewhere.

**Another way to manage anger is to physically cool off.** This is particularly useful in arguments: if you find yourself getting too angry with someone, get away from them to let your brain calm itself down before you do or say something you’ll regret. Removing yourself from the source of anger lets your body and brain wait out the surge of adrenaline that hits us when we get angry without having the target of the anger there in front of you.

*   **Active exercise** helps release anger. Go for a long walk, a run, or a hike.
*   **Relaxation techniques** like deep breathing and muscle relaxation help the body transition from the high arousal state of anger into a low arousal state.
*   **Distract yourself,** as long as the distraction is pleasant (Shortform note: There are examples of pleasant distractions in last section on sadness).

You could also try **writing down cynical, hostile, or angry thoughts as they arise**. This will help increase your self-awareness and give you an opportunity to challenge those thoughts, thus decreasing the anger. Once you’ve written them down, you’re forced to look at them and assess them, and you have a better chance of reappraising the situation -- but only if it’s in the earlier stages of anger. If you’re in a fit of rage, an exercise like this will probably fan the flames.

#### Managing Angry People

Someone at the peak of their rage is the most difficult person to manage. Data suggests a strategy to deal with someone in a fit of rage:

*   Distract them.
*   Empathize with their emotions and viewpoint.
*   Draw them into a different, more positive focus.

> Example: On a train one night, a drunk man started yelling at everyone, threatening them, and trying to destroy parts of the train car. Nothing seemed to work to stop him until an old man distracted him by greeting him as a friend and asking what he had to drink. The man had sake, and the old man talked about how much he and his wife love sake and how they drink it every night in their garden. Then the drunk man broke down: his wife had died recently, and he’d lost his job and his home because of his grief. Goleman calls this an act of emotional brilliance on the part of the old man.

### Anxiety

#### What It is

**Anxiety is a form of worrying, a kind of rehearsal of what could go wrong and potential ways we might deal with it.**

**The goal of worrying is to come up with solutions by anticipating danger before it occurs.** Too often it turns into a chronic, repetitive thought process, one that goes on and on but never actually gets to a positive solution because it keeps picking up new worries.

Chronic anxiety is an emotional hijacking beyond our control: worries seem to come from nowhere or be inspired by nothing, they’re impervious to reason, and cause the worrier to fixate on one or many anxiety-inducing topics.

There are generally two forms of anxiety:

*   **Cognitive anxiety is worrisome thoughts,** usually triggered by language.
*   **Somatic anxiety is physiological symptoms of anxiety,** triggered by images.

For example, insomniacs usually suffer from cognitive anxiety and not somatic anxiety, whereas those who have panic attacks usually suffer from somatic anxiety.

There are three different types of chronic anxiety:

*   Fear-based anxiety fixates on a triggering situation.
*   Obsession-based anxiety fixates on preventing a specific situation.
*   Panic attacks usually fixate on a fear of dying or on the panic attack itself.

#### How Not to Manage Anxiety

**Worry, when allowed to continue, almost always blows itself out of proportion.** In one study, participants were asked to intentionally worry for one minute out loud. Within just a few seconds, the worries had spiralled out into epic statements like “I’ll never be happy.”

Worry could easily be controlled by shifting your attention away from the worries. However, **the rational brain actually gets in the way here, and makes it harder to stop worrying**: we _could_ get a payoff from worrying by coming up with potential solutions to problems, and that would be a good thing. But anxiety actually doesn’t usually come up with positive solutions.

Because worrying is negative, it doesn’t function like a creative breakthrough, viewing the problem from different angles, thinking laterally to come up with new solutions, or feeling energized at the prospect of solving the problem. Instead, it’s a form of rigid thought that deals in generalities and follows a fixed, linear path -- this is why anxiety rarely leads to a useful solution and usually turns into a rut.

#### How to Manage Anxiety

**Relaxation methods work** to physically calm the body and take the mind off the worrisome thoughts -- but it’s best to practice relaxation methods daily, during totally normal moments, so at the time of crisis you can actually use the relaxation methods.

But relaxation isn’t usually enough -- anxiety needs to be actively challenged. **Here’s a list of questions you can ask to actively challenge anxious thoughts:**

*   Is the dreaded event probable?
*   Is there really only one way this situation can play out? Are there no alternatives?
*   What constructive steps can I take to deal with this problem?
*   Does it actually help to go through these thoughts over and over again?

### Sadness

#### What It Is

We experience sadness when we feel lonely or when we’ve lost something or someone that’s important to us. For example, even if you feel sad when you see a happy couple because you’ve never been in a relationship, you’re still mourning the perceived loss or lack of something you feel is important: companionship.

#### How Not to Manage Sadness

**People are most inventive when trying to change feelings of sadness, and it’s generally the mood people put the most energy into changing.** But, of course, a lot of our coping methods don’t actually positively deal with the sadness, they negatively reinforce it.

Isolating ourselves when we feel sad actually usually doesn’t make us feel better. It adds to our feelings of loneliness and distance.

A lot of us fixate on the sadness to try to figure out what’s wrong or to understand ourselves better. But this is rumination, which, as we already know, **actually increases and prolongs the feelings we’re ruminating on**. It’s useful to analyze your sadness if it actually leads to concrete actions or insights that will result in positive change -- but if you find yourself passively ruminating on why you’re so sad, you’re probably just reinforcing how sad you are.

*   We usually end up _worrying_ about some aspect of our sadness -- how little we’re getting done because of it, or how tired we are, or how unmotivated we feel. This usually doesn’t come with any actionable improvements.
*   Women are more likely to ruminate when they’re depressed than men, which might account for the higher rate of depression in women -- women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression than men. But this may also be attributed to the fact that women are generally more open to admitting their distress (men may be more likely to deal with their depression through alcohol -- they’re about twice as likely to be alcoholics).
*   Many people think “having a good cry” is an easy way to exorcize sadness, but again, it depends on the kind of crying: some cry sessions can break the feelings of sadness, but often, crying about something means we’re thinking about it, and the longer and harder we cry, the more we’re thinking about it -- this is ruminating in the form of crying.

#### How to Manage Sadness

**Here are 2 methods of combating sadness or rumination on sadness:**

1) **Intentionally schedule pleasant distractions.**

Sad thoughts are automatic and often enter our minds unbidden. So scheduling pleasant distractions actively breaks up these automatic thoughts and prevents them from intruding.

It’s important that the distractions actually be pleasant. In one study, depressed people were given a list of distractions and asked to choose one, and they ended up choosing the more depressing distractions.

Here are some good distractions, as long as they’re pleasant:

*   Read, watch TV or movies, or play video games that result in positive feelings.
*   Do puzzles.
*   Take a nap.
*   Let yourself daydream! Plan a fantasy vacation. Where would you go? For how long? What would you do?
*   Watch an exciting sporting event.
*   Get yourself a treat or indulge in some sensual pleasures: aromatherapy, a massage, a hot bath, good music, or even sex.
*   Help other people.
*   Pray to a higher power or practice gratitude.
*   Exercise is also useful for sadness. It releases endorphins and changes your physical state in the opposite way of anger: when angry, you’re in a high arousal state and exercise can put you into a low arousal state once you finish -- but when you’re sad, you’re in a low arousal state already, and the goal is to get you into a higher arousal state, which exercise does.

There are some commonly used distractions that have pitfalls, and might be worse for you in the long run. Exercise these with caution.

*   Eating is one method people use to deal with sadness, and this can spin out of control: most eating disorders originate as an attempt to deal with feelings by controlling or indulging in food.
*   Alcohol and drug dependencies also usually emerge as coping methods for negative feelings, so this is also a dangerous distraction or indulgence to get your mind off feeling sad, and should be used with caution.

**2)** **Engineer a small, easy success or triumph.** This will boost your mood and give you something positive to focus on.

*   Pick a chore you’ve been meaning to do or some other errand or task.
*   Get dressed up or put on makeup.
*   Volunteer or help others in need. In one study, this was one of the most powerful mood changers, but also the rarest.

### Repressing Emotions

Repressors are people who repress their emotions routinely and automatically erase emotional disturbances from their minds and their awareness.

This can be positive or negative. When it’s positive, it might be more appropriate to call these people **_unflappables_**. They’re actually deft experts at handling their own emotions, capable of pushing emotional responses out of their brains without much struggle and going on about their business. They’ve gotten so good at it, in fact, that they aren’t even aware of their negative feelings. They’ve silenced them completely.

Of course, on the negative side, **this can also mean the person is completely out of touch with their emotions**, still experiencing primarily physiological symptoms of emotions but being totally oblivious to the emotional cause of these symptoms.

*   This can often be the result of surviving a troubling situation early in life, such as having an alcoholic parent or suffering abuse. Parents who are repressors in this negative way also pass it on to their children as the appropriate way to deal with emotions, whether through nature in their DNA or through nurture in the family dynamic.

Neurologically, people who are genuine repressors are not feigning this obliviousness to emotional strife: their brains are essentially keeping this emotional information from them. People who exhibit repeated emotional repression have been found to have more brain activity in their left prefrontal lobe than their right -- the left prefrontal lobe is the center of good feelings, while the right is the center for negative feelings.

Chapter 5-2: Managing Anger, Anxiety and Sadness

Being able to identify and manage our emotions makes it easier to motivate ourselves to finish tasks and achieve goals. We also need to be able to delay gratification and overcome our impulses to be more productive and effective.

### Controlling Your Impulses

Goleman says **this is the most fundamental psychological skill**. Because emotions are impulses, being in control of your emotions is resisting the urge to fulfill impulses that are harmful or counterproductive.

**The ability to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal is necessary to achieve almost anything**. Very little of what we do on a moment-to-moment basis is gratifying -- most of us have obligations we have to meet, big-picture goals we’re working towards, or personal improvements we’re looking to make. All of these require us to delay immediate gratification in favor of doing something that will be beneficial down the line.

*   Think of eating a sweet versus working out. One will give us immediate gratification; the other takes time and energy but will ultimately be better for us.

#### The Marshmallow Experiment

There was a famous experiment done in the 1960s with children. They were left in a room with one marshmallow. They were told that if they didn’t eat the marshmallow before the researcher came back, they could have 2 marshmallows. Or they could choose to eat the single marshmallow right away.

The study followed the children into their adolescence, and the kids who had delayed gratification and resisted their impulses to eat the first marshmallow were:

*   Effective, assertive, confident, and self-reliant.
*   Socially competent, trustworthy, and dependable.
*   Cool under pressure, embracing of challenges, and still capable of delaying immediate gratification in pursuit of a goal.
*   More successful academically, with higher SAT scores.

On the other side, kids who ate the first marshmallow were:

*   Shy in social situations, jealous, envious, and combative.
*   Stubborn, indecisive, and easily frustrated.
*   Self-critical, prone to overreacting, and still incapable of delaying gratification.
*   Less successful academically, with lower SAT scores by an average of 210 points.

### Hope as Motivation

Hope, in this context, is the belief that you have the will and the means to accomplish a goal, regardless of what it is. **More hopeful people were found to have a variety of traits that made them more successful:**

*   They can self-motivate.
*   They view themselves as resourceful and try different ways to accomplish their goals.
*   When times are tough, they tell themselves it will get better.
*   They’re flexible enough to try different approaches towards reaching the same goal or switch goals if one proves too difficult to achieve.
*   They break down large, scary tasks into smaller, more manageable goals.

More hopeful people generally deal with less emotional distress throughout their lives, don’t give in to overwhelming anxiety, and suffer less from depression.

**Optimistic people see failure as something that can be changed so they can succeed next time they try.** Pessimists believe failure is something they’re doomed to experience because of who they are or what they’re (not) capable of -- the failure usually feels outside their control.

*   Talent, like IQ, is not enough to be successful -- the ability to keep going when faced with defeat can make or break success. There is no success without the failures that come before it, so pushing through the failures in pursuit of the ultimate goal becomes a necessary ability.

Hope is sometimes a better indicator of academic success than IQ. One study found that a student’s hopefulness was a better predictor of how good their grades would be in the first semester of college than SAT scores were.

As a caveat, we’re talking about realistic optimism here. Naive optimism can actually undermine success. It implies a lack of self-awareness or awareness of the circumstances that are necessary for success.

People are naturally born leaning more towards an optimistic or a pessimistic view of life, but temperament can be cultivated with experience and nurturing. **Hope and optimism can be taught and learned.**

### Losing Your Sense of Self in a Flow State

The most successful people in their fields -- masters of a certain subject or ability -- often describe their ideal working mentality as a “flow” state. **Flow state is a product of motivation, discipline, and practice.** They describe this state as one where you lose your sense of self -- you might as well not exist, or you go into full autopilot -- and your ability to do something seems to come from outside your mind or body. One composer described it as his hand working without him -- that the music just came pouring out _by itself_.

**This state represents the pinnacle of emotional control in the service of doing something**\--people who get into a flow state are not just controlling and directing their emotions, but their emotions become positive sources of energy that align with the goal they’re trying to achieve.

*   Like a composer channeling her emotions into a piece of music where what she’s feeling seems to translate immediately into music and build on itself, and the more she writes, the easier it comes, all her skills working together in perfect harmony (Shortform note: pun intended).

In this state, **our awareness merges with our actions**\--there’s little to no gap between what we’re conscious of and what we’re doing. Even reflecting on what we’re doing can take us out of a flow state -- it halts the relationship between thinking and doing for a moment of outside reflection like “This is going well!”

**It’s the opposite of anxiety.** Anxiety is the tendency to step out of the current moment and look down on it from above _with worry_. Flow state is the ability to be totally _in_ a moment and an action, without any removed opinions, good or bad.

#### How to Get Into a Flow State

First, it requires long-term discipline. To get into a flow state, **you have to have mastered the basics of what you’re trying to do**.

Next, it requires **high levels of calm and focus**. Flow is, in essence, a highly concentrated state, relaxed yet intensely focused.

Lastly, once the first two steps have been achieved, a flow state usually requires the **task at hand to be _just outside your abilities._** In other words, once you’ve mastered something, if you only perform it at that level, you’ll get bored. Flow occurs when you don’t have to think about the basics, but the task at hand is a challenge for you, so you are constantly engaged in performing the skills you’ve mastered to achieve a new level of success.

*   It can’t be too much of a challenge though, or you’ll probably get anxious -- if the task is too far outside your ability, you’ll find yourself reflecting on what’s going on in a negative way instead of keeping up with the challenge as it occurs.

#### The Feeling of Flow

When people get into this state, they usually describe the emotions they’re feeling as spontaneous rapture. There’s actually little emotional content other than a feeling of ecstasy that serves as motivation. They lose track of time or their surroundings.

Watching someone in a state of flow makes the difficult thing look easy: the performer looks like an effortless natural, despite the task being something of a challenge for them.

*   Olympic athletes are a great example of this: sprinters look like they’re barely expending effort to get ahead of one another, despite the fact that they’re challenging their physical abilities at the highest level.

And, in one sense, it is easy: the reason why people feel like the flow comes from outside themselves is that their brains are expending minimal mental energy. This is why mastering the techniques involved is crucial, as well as a sense of calm: well-practiced skills require less effort than freshly learned ones, and agitation or anxiety tire the brain out and decrease your ability to be concise in your efforts.

#### Flow State in Academics

**There’s a case for education embracing the idea of flow:** people are more likely to master something that they enjoy doing, and since people enjoy doing different things, a one-size-fits-all model of education might not bring out the best in students. When kids get bored in class or overwhelmed by anxiety if the pressure is too high, it becomes harder for them to learn. Motivating kids from the inside out -- letting them find the things that they care about and enjoy engaging in, and then helping them master their abilities to do those things -- might result in a better educated student body, even if their education has a more narrow focus.

**But teachers can use internal motivation and the idea of flow state to improve student performance in any subject:** schools that embrace this model of education identify a student’s individual profile of natural competencies, then pass those profiles on to teachers, who can use them to shift how a certain topic is presented.

*   For example, though math is numbers, if a child had a particular aptitude for music, math lessons could be taught through the vehicle of music, since the two are closely connected.

**The ultimate goal is to introduce every child to the flow state**\--once they know what this feels like, it will hopefully motivate and encourage them to take on challenges in other areas, with the hope of achieving the same results in a different subject. Studies reinforce this idea.

Atomic Habits

12 Rules for Life

Thinking, Fast and Slow

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Sapiens

The 48 Laws of Power

Principles: Life and Work

The 4-Hour Workweek

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Emotional Intelligence

Start With Why

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Grit

Deep Work

How to Read a Book

Never Split the Difference

Getting Things Done

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Why We Sleep

Rich Dad Poor Dad