A resolution, whether it’s made at the New Year or any other time, is a fragile thing. It can get swamped by other priorities, be badly chosen and never bloom, die stunted from being planted with too many other resolutions, wither from inattention, or fail to thrive in any number of other ways. But even if we’ve chosen our goals wisely and pursue them relentlessly, there’s one necessity that can make or break us: certainty about exactly what we’re doing.
I’m running into this problem at the moment with eating habits. I’m training for a half marathon in the Spring, my first, and at the same time I want to eat lower on the food chain so as to fight climate change. I also want to manage my cholesterol better, since I have a genetic predisposition to cholesterol problems, but there are at least two major schools of thought on how to do that, and they’re completely opposed to each other. So do I want to eat better in the New Year? Absolutely: that’s a very important priority for me. Do I know exactly how I want to eat better? Well, uh …
It probably seems obvious that I need to understand exactly how I want to be eating before I can follow through, but the truth is that the traditional way of setting goals or resolutions skips this essential step entirely: we resolve to lose weight or to be more organized, to have more time with family or to increase our productivity–but the truth is, none of these are really resolutions or goals. They’re wishes, aspirations, the ways we’d like to see things turn out. They’re important to think about, of course, but in order to be successful we have to know what exactly we plan to do. Track calories every day for six months at MyFitnessPal.com and go to the gym at least three times a week come Hell or high water? Plan a family activity every weekend? Spend ten minutes every workday morning to organize tasks? Those are goals. Those are resolutions.
I’ll point a couple of things out about those examples: first, each one of them is quantifiable. You don’t have to guess whether or not you’re on track with goals like those. Second, they’re focused on what we do, not on what we want to have happen. We can largely control what we do; what happens then is a lot less under our direction.
Recently I had the misfortune of seeing the movie Young Adult. It offers some interesting story elements, with very good acting and direction, and it does a great job of realistically depicting a writer’s job (something most movies about writers fail at miserably, despite presumably having been written by writers) but the storyline is appalling, and I can’t recommend the movie at all. The end of the movie actually had me shouting at the television with indignation and disgust … although really, I was shouting at the screenwriter, Diablo Cody.
Ms. Cody wrote one of my favorite movies of all time, Juno, so I don’t mean to suggest that she writes only bad movies. I got some insight into where she was coming from when I read this excerpt from a Huffington Post article about the movie:
“I feel like Facebook is, in a lot of ways, proof that people don’t change,” Cody said. “The fact that we can keep up with the people that we used to know and watch them progress or not progress — which is the case most of the time — it’s interesting and it’s a little sad.”
So in that framework, the movie makes sense. If you believe people don’t change, you might then write a movie about a person who is a mess and doesn’t change. However, writing a movie like that doesn’t make it a workable story–nor does it make it true.
People who think people don’t change need to spend time with more and different people. Have you ever met a recovered alcoholic? Ever met someone who went back to school later in life and started a new career? Someone who lost a bunch of weight and got the fitness bug? I certainly do.
Facebook certainly isn’t proof that people don’t change: in fact, the primary reason I seek people out on Facebook is to find out how they have changed. What are their relationships like now? What kind of work do they do? What’s important to them? Where do they live? How are they spending their time? Are they happy? What happened later in the story of that person I used to know and have lost touch with?
It’s true, though, that we’re built to resist change. Our habitual behaviors are expressed in our brains as neural connections that strengthen over time, and it takes concerted effort or a stark change of circumstances to build new connections. However, this is worlds away from saying we don’t change. With the right influence or effort, virtually anything about us can change. Unskilled people can become masterful (see “Do You Have Enough Talent to Become Great at It?“); unhealthy people can become healthy (“Finding Exercise You Love: The Taekwondo Example“); and unhappy people can get used to having joy in their lives (see “The Best 40 Percent of Happiness“), for example.
The thing that most upsets me about the idea that people don’t change is that it tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In a meta-study about willpower done a few years back, a key finding was that individuals who were trying to change their habits generally didn’t succeed unless they believed they could. This makes sense: how much effort will we realistically invest in something that we feel won’t pan out?
Trying to convince people wholesale that change isn’t possible hacks away at the foundation of confidence we need to be able to change, and that foundation is essential even when we fail at first. For example, consider that a smoker who has unsuccessfully tried to quit before has a better chance of quitting now, statistically, than a smoker who has never tried to quit before. In some cases, the mistaken belief that the smoker could quit on the first or second attempt allowed that person to get far enough along to successfully quit on a later attempt.
People accomplish real change every day, but it’s far more likely that change will happen when we understand and believe it’s possible in the first place.
Recently I posted about Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit, in which he talks about habits in individuals, companies, and cultures. I mentioned that toward the end of the book he gives a concise method for changing specific habits, using the example of his own habit (which as of the writing of the book he seemed to have entirely kicked) of getting a chocolate chip cookie in the mid afternoon every workday.
The habit process he describes, which seems to be backed up quite well by psychological reseach, has three parts: the cue, the routine, and the reward. The part we think about changing when we tend to think about kicking a bad habit or acquiring a good one is the routine: the action we take. In order to change the routine–or even in order to figure out what to change the routine to–it’s first necessary to identify the cue and the reward.
The cue can be practically anything, but Duhigg mentions that researchers have found it generally falls into one of the following categories. This is convenient: these categories give us obvious questions to ask ourselves when trying to identify our habit cues.
The categories are
place
time
people
emotional state
preceding action
For instance, if I have a habit of watching TV late into the night (which fortunately I don’t); it might be because I’m at home and that’s what I’m used to doing when I’m at home (place), because it’s 8:00 and I’m used to turning on the TV then (time); because I’m with my roommate, who likes a lot of the same TV shows I do (people); because I’m feeling anxious and want to be distracted (emotional state); or because I’ve just finished cleaning up from dinner and like to take a break after doing that (preceding action).
Sometimes it’s probably not quite that simple, as when a mix of cues are at work (for instance, I have to be at home and it has to be a certain time and I have to feel a certain way), but this approach is useful even if we’re breaking down a more complex habit.
To identify the cue, Duhigg proposes jotting down answers to each of those five questions every time you find yourself acting out your habit.
Where am I?
What time is it?
Who’s nearby?
What’s my emotional state?
What did I just finish doing?
Taking note of those five things, on paper, for (say) five or ten executions of the habit will often be enough to shed light on exactly what’s starting your habit process rolling.
Of course, you might recognize your cue just by thinking about your habit for a few moments. For instance, if the habit you’re trying to break is stopping at a particular bar every day on your way home from work, it’s likely that your cue is driving past that bar–a place cue.
Cues are also helpful for creating new habits. For example, I had trouble getting in the habit of flossing my teeth regularly when I first tried, because I would try to fit it in whenever I had time available, morning or evening. There was no clear and unique cue to use.
When I then tried adding it in the morning, I wasn’t successful because I’m often on a tight schedule in the morning, and I wasn’t willing to make myself late by adding flossing when I hadn’t planned time for it in advance.
The point at which I did become successful with that habit was when I started doing it at night, just before brushing my teeth. My cue was standing at the sink and looking over at my toothbrush in the evening, a combination of time, place, and attention. Even though focus or attention isn’t one of the five most common cue types Duhigg names, speaking from my own experience, it certainly seems to play a part in some of my habits.
Once the cue has been identified, there’s still the issue of figuring out a routine–either a changed one to preempt the habit you’re trying to break or a new one to lay the pattern for the habit you want to gain. I’ll talk more about the routine and the reward here in the near future.
If you’re working on ditching a bad habit or adding a good habit, I’d love to hear from you, whether privately (look for the contact form on the right) or through comments here, both to know about what you’re trying and to learn from your results.
I’m not much of a fan of sitcoms, but here’s the voice over introduction to one that’s not only dang amusing, but also a surprisingly good course in habit change:
You know the kinda guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks? Well, that was me. Every time something good happened to me, something bad was always waiting around the corner. Karma. That’s when I realized I had to change. So I made a list of everything bad I’ve ever done, and one by one I’m gonna make up for all my mistakes. I’m just trying to be a better person. My name is Earl.
I’ve enjoyed watching episodes of Earl via Netflix for a year or so, but it wasn’t until this morning, reading Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The Power of Habit, that I realized that Earl’s method of changing his life is a near-perfect model of real habit change, as supported by reams of research, a few superbowl championships, millions of now-sober alcoholics, and much other evidence.
Just trying to be a better person
Earl, played with innocence and a blind, cheerful, openness to whatever may come by Jason Lee, used to be a small-time criminal, stealing whatever he could, however he could–the dumber the idea, the better. In the series, he now spends his time hunting down people he’s hurt and trouble he’s caused, one item at a time, and making up for all those past mistakes. Compare this to Duhigg’s depiction of habit change, which has two main components: replacing the routine and cultivating belief.
Changing a habit by substituting a new routine Habits, as Duhigg describes them, have three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward. For example, the cue might be boredom; the routine, eating a bag of potato chips; and the reward, the physical pleasure of eating the chips.
Earl’s cue was anything that might get him some easy money or swag; his routine was committing the crime in whatever hare-brained way immediately came to mind; and his reward (when he got one) was acquiring some new stuff on his supposed path to the good life.
In present of the series, though, that’s all old news. Earl’s new cues are pretty much the same as his old ones: he hatches an idea or stumbles across a situation that provides an opportunity, but now it’s an opportunity to make up for something bad he’s done rather than a potential crime. He still uses whatever hare-brained approach leaps to mind to get the job done, but the core of the routine is different: instead of petty theft, it’s making up for wrongdoing. The reward is similar: he doesn’t get any physical wealth, but he counts his riches in karma now, and his satisfaction and pleasure at crossing off an item from his list is palpable, not to mention very similar to the satisfaction we see in flashback scenes of him successfully getting away with crime.
That’s the way to change a habit, says Duhigg: keep the cues and the rewards the same, but change the routine. Actually, I would suggest that should be amended to keeping the cues the same, change the routine, and allow for a modestly different reward: drinking a cup of tea doesn’t give the exact same payoff as smoking a cigarette, for instance, but the rewards are surprisingly similar.
You gotta believe!
It would be handy if changing habits were as simple as identifying cues and rewards and finding a new routine to sandwich in the middle, and in fact this seems to be a central part of habit change–but, as Duhigg points out, this isn’t enough. You have to believe. I’ll write about this more in separate posts, but this belief component has been identified as a key force in the psychological literature. In order to really change, we have to have a powerful faith that what we’re doing can–maybe even must–be done.
Earl exemplifies this through his faith in karma, which he pictures as a simplistic, tit-for-tat force that automatically responds to any good or bad deed with good or bad fortune somewhere in the space of the 22-minute episode. Since this is a sitcom, karma actually works that way in Earl’s world, which means that when Earl’s starves himself and his brother, runs out of gas, and has to walk miles and miles to dance with Too-Tall Maggy (whom he spurned in the 8th grade), by the end of the episode he has been amply rewarded and is back drinking cheap beer with no cigarette butts in it. This convenient help from the universe makes it easy for Earl to believe, and is the one place where Earl’s life change is very different from real world changes, even though both require belief to get through the trying times. Our belief doesn’t come as easily as Earl’s, and it can be difficult and sometimes impossible to maintain on our own without special circumstances.
How to believe without magical instant karma
So how do we come to believe powerfully enough that even when our efforts seem nearly pointless, we can soldier on? In real life, belief comes in two main forms: tragedies and groups. As I say, this subject will be worth a good bit of further discussion, but the short version is that most of us only really change when something earth-shaking happens in our lives or in the lives of people close to us, or else when we become part of a group that makes the possibility change seem real. This is why a person can sometimes quit drinking after a DUI incident or after joining AA, but often can’t when just trying to push through alone. Note that even the disaster approach may only provide enough belief to get started: durable belief often depends on having a group of people in our lives to permanently change our point of view.
Earl, by contrast, spends his time with the exact same group of unprincipled, dim-witted friends and associates who urged him on to crime in a former chapter of his life–but his remedial, absolute faith in karma carries him through beautifully.
Like Earl, many of us are just trying to be better people. As far as I’m concerned, we’re lucky to have people like Earl (and Charles Duhigg, and AA founder Bill Wilson, and others) to show us the way.
One of the things that fascinates me and that I continue to try to fully understand is the sudden perspective shift that changes everything. For instance, if you’ve ever read Les Miserables (or seen the musical or a movie of the story, even), you’ll remember the moment when Jean Valjean, an escaped convict, has been caught by the authorities while is was fleeing the home of a bishop who sheltered him and is in possession of valuables he stole from the bishop. The bishop, instead of accusing Valjean, tells the authorities that the stolen goods are gifts, and even adds to them. This utterly unexpected turn changes Valjean’s perspective for the rest of his life–much for the better, I might add.
But Valjean is fictional, and while the example is fascinating, though there’s much to think about in the debate that plays out in the rest of the story (what I read of it–while I know it’s not considered respectable to purposely put aside a classic, Hugo’s novel wanders too much to keep me engaged. He lost me after the whole Napoleon interlude).
Cartoonist Randall Munroe, whose work I often find absolutely brilliant (for instance, see my post on his Zombie Marie Curie comic from about a year ago), recently posted a cartoon that illustrated, literally and dramatically, what a real perspective shift is like, with plenty of dark humor. Here is that comic:
In a previous post (“Are Libraries Doomed?“), I talked about the forces that I believe are likely to bring libraries as we currently know them to an end. In this post, I’ll talk about the one approach I know of that I hope might save some libraries.
It’s all about the community
One facet of libraries is unlikely to ever become entirely obsolete, and that’s being a center for community activities. Many libraries already offer events like readings, talks, meetings, and play space for children, and this function could be expanded to turn the library into a key event venue, a meeting space, a hangout, and a focal point of local culture. While electronic communication continues to cannibalize face-to-face interaction, some face-to-face interaction is essential to us as human beings, and we’ve lost many places we used to have for doing that. If libraries can expand on their existing roles to become a major force locally as teen center, community center, senior center, performance space, meeting space, event space, workout space, dance space, and more, they could come to mean even more to their local communities than they do today.
Swans becoming monkeys Unfortunately, there are at least a couple of problems with this approach. The first is that social activity is not what people who run libraries have devoted their lives to. It’s easy to imagine a library as a cultural center, sure, with some social events–but the great strength of libraries and librarians has always been providing materials and resources to the community, not organizing Swing Dance Saturdays or boffer battles or remaking a room into an inviting teen center. Fortunately, a number of librarians have a lot of these skills–and yet sometimes the change in job would be like a swan becoming a monkey. The stereotype is that librarians are obsessed with quiet. Can the average librarian depart so far from that stereotype to embrace pretty much its exact opposite?
The other problem that comes to mind immediately for me is that as wonderful as such a center might be, we–at least we here in America–aren’t generally used to having a community center where we want to go regularly. We would have to be convinced and retrained to stop by just to see who’s around, to check the event schedule regularly, to think of new things to do there, and to go to the library instead of a coffee shop or bar–and instead of just going home to watch TV. Can we make that change?
My prediction: a few libraries will succeed at this brilliantly. Many will try and fail. Many more won’t try and will just fade away. And a few–a very few–will continue to be supported as a sort of quaint curiosity doing what they have always done: making physical media available to people in person.
Before I start here, I want to make one thing clear: I love libraries. They have been a haven and a treasure trove to me since I was young. Whatever I may say in this post about the future of libraries, please know that it’s not because I want anything bad to happen to them.
Primarily I love libraries because they’re places we’ve created as communities to share the written word. Few things in life, it seems to me, are cooperative, highly useful, and (in a limited sense) free.
If libraries were to end, I also would hate to think of communities losing that anchor of identity, of the waste of beautiful buildings, of paper volumes being shredded or dumped or moldering away, and of librarians (who in my experience are disproportionately great people) cast off into unemployment.
Yet my honest sense is that libraries, by and large, are doomed.
What changed? Maybe “what’s changed?” is the wrong question: after all, we all know what changed–or to be more accurate, is in the process of changing right now. It’s eBooks. Since before the Sumerians started making marks in clay 5,000 years ago, the written word has been intimately bound with physical objects. As personal computers and later other devices started to become more common, certainly a lot of electronic words sprang into being, but most of us don’t want to use a computer to read: it’s just not physically comfortable, and sometimes it’s not practical. So while magazines and newspapers have been feeling the dark tendrils of obsolescence grope at them for a decade or more, until recently bookstores and libraries were largely unaffected.
In fact libraries expanded to embrace the availability of electronic media, adapting to offer computer terminals, free wi-fi, and online resources.
Now, though, eReaders have begun taking hold. This mundane-looking type of device with its limited features and lack of any sense of glitz has been quietly stealing away reader after reader from physical books (and some other printed media). I was stolen away about a year ago, when a friend bought me a Kindle. I thought I would really miss physical books. I was pretty much wrong.
I know there’s debate over whether eBooks can replace physical books. People make good points like the physical experience of reading a book or the ability to hand a physical copy of a book to a friend. It’s certainly true that there are some nice things about physical books. Not the trees mowed down to produce them or the excruciating returns procedures the publishing industry is locked into or the storage space requirements, but certainly the satisfaction of having a physical object that represents a wonderful experience, the ability to leave books lying around for children to stumble upon, the ability to pass along stories ideas by handing something to someone.
Yet having looked at the issue in great detail, I have to conclude that eBooks are going to almost completely replace physical books within the decade. You may disagree with me, but if you care about libraries, you may want to pretend for the moment that you grant the point and explore with me what this might mean, since if I’m right, libraries may have to change now if they are going to have any chance of surviving.
As with physical books, so with libraries Although libraries were created to store and share physical books, they’ve adapted beautifully to new media. First reel-to-reel audio and films, then cassette tapes and video tapes, then CDs and DVDs became staple items at libraries. Libraries often provide free access to the Web and have a library Web site where you can look up books. The old card catalogs have turned into searchable databases. Microfilm and microfiche have yielded to digital storage.
Yet libraries are still tied to a physical experience in a specific place. The entire reason municipal libraries are funded in the first place is to benefit local citizens. While it’s true that you can get digital media from libraries–as with some eBook borrowing programs–you can also get digital media from a lot of other sources, and you don’t have to go to the physical library to get these in most cases anyway. Vermont librarian Kata Welch recently commented, ” If people want e-books, libraries will find a way to supply them and meet their patrons’ needs.” I think she’s right that libraries are more than able to accomplish this–but I don’t think libraries can survive this way.
After all, what’s the use of a physical building when you’re sharing materials that can be easily shared with someone at any other location? And what’s the use of a small local library online if there are thousands of other small local libraries online? If libraries take this approach of still being a source for sharing written and other media, but in electronic rather than physical form, then first they’ll be forced out of buildings and onto the Web, then they’ll inevitably join forces with other libraries because the economies of scale are so significant, and eventually the services will be so widespread that any sense of locality will be utterly lost–if the approach even survives at all. Given all the free material (books, stories, blogs, and so on) that’s available for eReaders and how easy and sometimes inexpensive it is to buy eBooks, I’m not convinced that many people will continue to rely on borrowing books at all, regardless of form.
But libraries are more than books! It’s true, libraries are more than books. The problem is that sharing media–books, films, audio recordings, magazines, etc.–is the essential, core service that libraries provide. If libraries are no longer mainly about providing that service, can municipalities continue to justify paying as much as they do for them? How many people would use them? Enough to justify the space and expense?
I think there’s one way many libraries might be able to survive, but it would take a lot of effort and change and still wouldn’t succeed everywhere. I’ll talk about that in my follow-up post in the next day or two.
I love movies and novels where a character finally makes a change that we’ve been dying to see since the story began. I love seeing Lester in American Beauty finally understanding the importance of other people, when he sheds the worst of his self-deceptions. It’s a huge relief to see Miss Havisham in Great Expectations break down and finally see what she’s done to herself, Pip, and Estella. Yet to some extent, these transformations are a lie.
The bad news
Let’s face it, our problems, hangups, bad habits, and limitations aren’t hats or shoes, ready to be taken off and replaced at any moment. They’re more like our bodies, which can’t be replaced but can be gradually transformed. The trick of it isn’t to get to that one sudden moment of transformation, because there is no moment of transformation in which a body suddenly becomes healthy after being unhealthy, or in which decades-long thinking patterns spontaneously unwind themselves from our brains. The neural connections we’ve established through repeating problem behaviors or choices over and over can go away, but they only go away gradually.
To put it another way, making one choice one time will not transform us, although it can start us on that road. But making one choice dozens or hundreds or (sometimes) thousands of times will change us. Instead of receiving goals like prizes, we build them up bit by bit, so that a goal is less often something accomplished than a state we reach from some kind of thought or action that we’ve woven into our daily lives.
The good news
Is sudden change useless or imaginary, then? No! We really can and do experience sudden changes of perspective, insights or experiences that completely alter the way we look at some part of our life. And when we start something radical and good, like doing a task that’s been dreaded and avoided for months or going out and offering forgiveness to the person we have most reason to despise, that action can release a lot of energy to propel us forward into thinking similar thoughts and making similar choices going forward. Except in the most extreme cases, we’ll need more than that initial charge to get us all the way to a new habit, but the initial charge can still count for a lot.
Ultimately I think these dramatic fictional transformations do have a value to us, and that value is in their illuminating what it feels like to become a different person. Often the hardest thing about motivating ourselves to follow the difficult path that leads to an altered self is believing that change is even possible. But both in fiction and in life, if we look for them, examples of transformation are all around us.
You look at your life and decide you need to change something. It might be eating healthier foods, getting your papers organized, or not watching so much TV. At first you’re excited about it, especially when you try it out and you actually start to make some progress. Things are going well.
Then a problem crops up. Maybe you’re invited to dinner and the menu is so far from your healthy eating list, you can’t see it from there without a high-powered telescope. Or you have an important engagement in the evening and don’t get home until 10:30–too late to easily do your filing for the day. Or you find out there’s a marathon of your favorite show ever airing over the weekend.
What often happens to us in these situations is that we make an exception. It’s so inconvenient–nearly impossible, we sometimes tell ourselves–to keep with our program that we can make one completely reasonable exception. And then another exceptional situation comes up, and another, and pretty soon we realize we haven’t been making progress at all and give up in despair.
When this happens, it isn’t that the universe is against us: in fact, this is exactly how we should expect things to go if we try to break a habit. By definition, doing things by habit means taking the easy road, and so breaking a habit–or forming a new one–means taking the difficult road.
To put it another way, habits aren’t made and broken by only changing our behavior when it’s convenient to do so: the real changes in our behavior come when we have to push really hard to maintain our new intentions. It doesn’t take much effort or thought to, for instance, keep up with filing papers when we have plenty of time and no interruptions. The real test–and the time when we have the greatest opportunity to change our own mental processes–comes when things get inconvenient, when we’re tired, distraught, distracted, embarrassed, busy, or when we don’t have all of our materials or tools on hand. When we choose to say “I’m going to stick with my goals anyway” in this periods, we become able to change even deeply-ingrained habits. But when we wait for change to become convenient, we’re likely to be left waiting a very, very long time.
One of the most challenging things about managing a task list is prioritizing. You may literally have hundreds of things to do, from raking the leaves to learning a new job skill to making up a will. Comparing and ordering these items can be overwhelming.
Following are some basic principles to apply when prioritizing tasks that can help make sense out of a very complex set of priorities.
1. Priorities change all the time
It would be nice to be able to assign every task a priority that never changes, but from day to day–and sometimes hour to hour–too many things change for this to be the case. Scheduling a check-up becomes gradually more urgent the longer we put it off, or suddenly more urgent if health problems come up. Projects around the house may have to slide down the list of priorities when a new obligation comes up that makes it unlikely there will be time for them. Problems solve themselves or get worse from inattention; opportunities arise; people change their preferences and actions. Therefore, the best prioritization we can really achieve is the priority of things at the given moment, and the most effective task list is one that you can (and do) regularly re-prioritize.
This series will continue over the next several posts.
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Dec 31, 2012 
A resolution, whether it’s made at the New Year or any other time, is a fragile thing. It can get swamped by other priorities, be badly chosen and never bloom, die stunted from being planted with too many other resolutions, wither from inattention, or fail to thrive in any number of other ways. But even if we’ve chosen our goals wisely and pursue them relentlessly, there’s one necessity that can make or break us: certainty about exactly what we’re doing.
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change, goals, Habits, new year's resolutions, new years, planning, resolutions
