The science of successful habits

You are going to fail.

There, now that we have appropriately set expectations, let’s look at why that is and how you can reduce the probability of big failures so that you can build procedures and habits that will yield more wins and minimize the opportunities for lapses while ultimately helping yourself succeed.

The first thing we must address is the fact that you are probably setting yourself up for failure because of the binary approach most people take combined with an arbitrary date on the calendar.  Almost half of people give up on their New Year’s resolutions by the end of January (Jan. 19 is the most likely drop date) because of the “all or nothing” approach of:

1. Not drinking after tonight.
2. Going to the gym every day starting Jan. 1.
3. Reading X number of books in a year.
4. Implementing a radical diet change to lose 40 pounds in 45 days.

Too much too quickly is a recipe for failure.

Both Jim Kwik, author of Limitless, and James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, write about what is essentially a slow change in identity by making tiny sustainable changes on an incremental basis. Some examples of these are:

1. Choosing one night a week to not drink. Then two. Eventually making it three.
2. Signing up for a fun class that gets you moving, beginning twice a week.
3. Reading at least one page a day.
4. Making slow diet changes, such as smaller plates and more vegetables.

Few people have the willpower to go “cold turkey,” whether from cigarettes or doughnuts or soda or to get up at 5 a.m. every day. But weaning yourself requires much less willpower and is much more forgiving.  

Know that messing up and giving in to temptation are normal, so not having a completely unforgiving pass/fail personal grading system allows you to get off and then back on track much more easily. You will have the latitude to forgive yourself and move forward as “better” instead of “perfect.” Eating a cupcake is not a total failure that indicates you should just throw up your hands, give up and eat half a cake a day because you believe you’re a loser and will always fail. Just be better with your eating habits tomorrow than you were two weeks ago.

So first off, don’t commit to making 150 calls a week if you are accustomed to making only 28, or getting up at 4:45 a.m. if you are now waking at 8:12 a.m. That’s like going from only walking around the block to running a 5K every morning. It’s a recipe for failure and probably injury. Take it slower to start, then ramp it up.

A better idea would be to commit to making 35 calls this week and 15 more per week thereafter until you are up to the level you wish. Or getting up 10 minutes earlier every Monday until you’ve shifted your sleep patterns to be an early riser. Yes, it will take you six or eight weeks to change your mindset the same way your body would change while ramping up the mileage that you run over a two-month period.  

Incremental changes are sustainable.

It generally takes 14 to 66 days to establish a new habit, depending on how radical a departure the new behavior is from the old ways. But small, continuous improvements or changes barely register as alterations or tweaks rather than something entirely new. As such, these small changes are easy to adopt. As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither did it fall overnight, so give yourself time to get into your groove.

Radical changes fail. Tiny tweaks work. Take little steps.

The brain has evolved to operate efficiently, so that we can have smaller heads and not kill our mothers during childbirth. So we literally imbed habits at the nerve level, and the ability to form effective habits creates the efficient brains needed to perpetuate the species. And there are three steps to this neural pathway creation.

Craving. Action. Reward. CAR. You can remember it this way: A CAR can take you almost anywhere, and good habits will take you everywhere.

If you are a smoker, you crave nicotine. Thus, you smoke a cigarette, get the dopamine hit reward and feel good, which is why it becomes really difficult to stop smoking. This is an example of CAR.

As a musician, you feel uncomfortable and on edge if you aren’t practicing, so you take out your instrument and get a fix. Feel-good chemicals flood your brain, and the habit is strengthened. Another example of CAR.

Research from the National Institutes of Health shows that only 9% of people who make New Year’s resolutions actually achieve them. But one common theme among those who succeed is big goal/little steps, an idea that financial professionals are already familiar with. To make it more interesting — and therefore actionable — let’s make it relevant.

You commit to making 35 calls, and you make them even if it takes some struggle. You sit back, smile, and raise your hands in triumph and pride. You’ve experienced CAR. Yet after achieving this small goal, you need a bigger reward and so you need to take bigger action, but you crave that moment of finishing and succeeding, so you focus on 50 calls as the next challenge.  

You hit this 50-call challenge, so you raise the goal and increase the effort. As a result, the biochemical reward becomes stronger and the neuropathways become more efficient. Voila, you are becoming addicted to the process of successful habits. Within two months, you are making 150 calls a week and have gone from $4,000 of weekly production to $9,000. You are about to break through $10,000, then $12,000, and remarkably end up with $500,000 by the end of the year. 

Let’s say you are shooting to do $500,000 of production this year, a big goal, as it makes you a little nervous and excited to even talk about it. That feeling is the cocktail of dopamine (the hormone of striving and desire) and norepinephrine (the fear factor).  

A little fear mixed in with desire gives us butterflies in the stomach when we talk to that person we desire, or before we go on stage, or anytime we attempt any good BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal per Jim Collins in Good to Great). The BHAG energizes us and gives us motivation, because mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) literally convert dopamine into energy for action, while norepinephrine sharpens focus. This balance is why we all need those huge goals, such as:

1. “By the end of the decade we will put a man on the moon.” – John F. Kennedy.
2. Earning your black belt in martial arts.
3. Earning your CLU or CFP designation.
4. Running your first marathon.
5. Getting 5,000 paying subscribers (my personal BHAG).
6. Buying a home.
7. Writing $500,000 of production.

By the way, put your big goal on your phone screen, because the average person looks at their phone several hundred times a day. Seeing your BHAG all the time won’t inoculate you with that goal, but it will remind you what you are working toward. Plus, it will help improve your resilience as you encounter the inevitable obstacles, such as birthday cake in the break room tempting you on your diet or a beautiful sunny day when you have a huge meeting the next morning. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, if a man has a strong enough why, he will overcome any how.

The next thing is to break the big goal into little steps. As anyone that has gone through a recovery program can tell you, it isn’t about staying sober for 10 years, because that is too big to focus on; it is about staying sober today. It’s about doing what you need to do to win the day, and then days add up to weeks and months and eventually you accomplish the BHAG.  

Marathons are run one step at a time.

To earn a black belt, you train every day. The black belt is the natural outcome of the process of practicing and pushing yourself in each training session.

To get my 5,000 subscribers, I need to get 15 a day (you could be one of them).

To do $500,000 of production a year, you only need $2,500 a day.

But you must do it every day.

Not literally, because we are human and sometimes we get sick (or the kids get sick), or a snowstorm comes in, there is a mandatory meeting, or we get hit with something else that we didn’t expect. But if you can meet the little step daily goal 90% of the time, you should hit the big goal without needing to resort to extraordinary measures. Fitness expert Dan Go reminds us that if you are 90% good with your diet and exercise, you’ll be among the best in your peer group. Same with hitting your little steps 90% of the time. If you missed it today, hit it tomorrow.

So if you aspire to do $500,000 of production, how do you set yourself up to do $2,500 of production today? And how do you set up today to do $2,500 of production tomorrow? Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Productive People, calls it balancing production and production potential. Once you answer these questions, you then set up your environment to make it easy to do what you have to do daily, minimizing the motivation required. Process will always be more powerful than emotion or mood; that is why Stephen King and Jocko Willink both write each day even if it’s junk, because they know that the daily activity will eventually yield the results.

Have faith in the process. Trust the system.

And don’t worry about being behind if you get the proper mindset, because as you get better at getting better, you will exceed the daily goals in the last half of the year (just as runners or musicians get better at getting better and show nonlinear growth after the initial period of adjustment). Then you will hit that BHAG by the end of the year by slowly creating the sustainable environment for success in your office and in your head.

That “too much too quickly is a recipe for failure” is relevant because falling short breaks the cycle. Trying to jump from $4,000 a week to $10,000 a week leads to too much failure and a lack of regular rewards. You don’t get your dopamine flood from winning consistently, so you quit the action since the craving was not strong enough to force you to do what you needed to do. This explains why increasing the goal after each achievement establishes a feedback mechanism like that a drug addict experiences but in a positive and productive way. And it’s why you need little steps to hit the big goals, because each little step hardwires the craving required for a habit loop.

The goal is not perfection, because as humans, we will fail if we don’t challenge ourselves to grow. The objective is continuously improving in a maintainable manner by raising the bar for the dopamine reward and hitting the target somewhere around five weeks out of six after the habit loop is established (typically four to six successful weeks in a row are required, hence the lower bar to begin). Find something a little challenging that is a step toward your big goal, and take small steps to move in that direction. 

Keep ramping up the activity or challenge so that on a biochemical level you need more and more achievement to get the dopamine release and you are wiring your brain to crave the activities that lead to victory, fully knowing that you are going to have to struggle to get the hit and feel good as you progress. 

You are establishing championship habits.

Create a craving, execute the actions and get your reward. Become addicted to winning, and build up your tolerance by winning at little things, then larger ones. Eventually you will get the big goal.

This is the science of success and why you will fail if you try to take too big a step too quickly.  Now go get a little win to start building the habits of a champion! 

Joe Templin, MCEC, CEC, CLU, ChFC, CAP, is the author of Every Day Excellence and creator of the Financial Services Daily Drip-Every Day Excellence training email, https://www.salesactivitymanagement.com/everyday-excellence/. He is NAIFA New York State membership chair. He may be contacted at [email protected].