5 principles for living a happier, more productive life
Over the past few years I’ve written a lot about what makes people happy and productive.
While scouring through blog posts and academic journals on psychology, health, science, and building habits, five general principles seemed to pop up time and time again.
Now I’m not claiming to have the secret to a happy life here, but whether it’s a strategy for being more productive, a discussion about human behavior, or a tip for building healthy habits, chances are one of these principles will apply to your own life.
1. People aren’t rational, they’re emotional
“If you believe people use reason for the important decisions in life, you will go through life feeling confused and frustrated that others seem to have bad reasoning skills. The reality is that reason is just one of the drivers of our decisions, and often the smallest one.” Scott Adams
I had a lightbulb moment when I read this quote in Scott’s book. I do go through life feeling confused and frustrated at other people’s terrible reasoning skills! Finally I know why.
Politics is one area this comes up a lot for me. Although it still frustrates me, I try to hang onto Scott’s words when I see politicians on TV these days:
“Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie. If you’re perplexed at how society can tolerate politicians who lie so blatantly, you’re thinking of people as rational beings.”
Let’s say that one more time: That’s even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie.
What kind of crazy beings are we?!
The trick, according to Scott, is to think of people as ‘moist machines’ that respond to inputs. When you can tell that someone is making a decision without relying on reason, it makes no sense to keep pushing your rational argument onto them. They’re in ‘emotional’ mode, and that’s all they’ll respond to.
“If you’ve ever had a frustrating political debate with your friend who refuses to see the logic in your argument, you know what I mean. But keep in mind that the friend sees you exactly the same way.”
It sounds a little harsh to imagine your friends and family as moist robots, but it can be surprisingly useful when it comes to communication and getting along with others. It takes a lot of practice (I’m still terrible at it) but if you can let go of rational arguments and find a way to emotionally connect with people, you’ll have much better success at persuading them to see your point of view.
2. We’re drawn to convenience
If you’ve ever settled for junk food for dinner because cooking seems like too much effort you’ll know what I mean by this. Convenience rules our lives. Just take a walk in the supermarket and see which products cost the most, and which are bought the most (hint: not only do we love convenience, we pay for it too). Or look around your house and take note of all the gadgets, software, and layout decisions that exist to make your life more convenient.
It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a fact. We’re drawn to convenience.
When I move my chair around in front of my desk, I usually grab the desk and use it to propel my chair around. My legs are short and my chair’s a bit big, so this is much more convenient than moving forward to get enough purchase on the floor to move my chair like any normal person would.
The cool thing about our tendency to appreciate convenience is that we can use this to our advantage. Making bad habits harder on ourselves means we’ll be less likely to do them. If you watch too much TV, put the remote away in a different room, and the remote’s batteries in another room, and the TV’s power cord in another room. That’s super inconvenient to setup. It’s also inconvenient to pack away when you’re done, but if you stick to it, I bet you’ll be less likely to go to all the effort of watching TV in the first place.
If your bad habit is browsing Facebook too much, add a browser extension (like StayFocused or LeechBlock) to block your access when you should be working instead. And put your phone into flight mode. Or better yet, switch it off if you can. Turning on your phone and waiting for it to start up just to check Facebook is pretty inconvenient.
I have a bad habit of looking at my phone too much right before I go to sleep. I’ll often get an idea for something that could be useful as I’m trying to sleep, and next thing I know I’ve spent an hour researching and have woken up my brain too much to get any shut-eye for hours. These days I put my phone downstairs before I go to bed. Getting up and going all the way downstairs to get it is usually inconvenient enough that it’s not worth it once I’ve settled into bed.
On the other hand, if we can make good habits more convenient, we’ll be more likely to do them. This can work really well in tandem with making a bad habit inconvenient.
Let’s go back to the Facebook example. You still want to have short breaks throughout the day, but you don’t want to get sucked into wasting time on Facebook. So you make Facebook inconvenient to access, and you put a book on your desk. Make it a book that you’re really enjoying, and put it right in your view.
Whenever you have some downtime, it’s going to be pretty convenient to grab that book and sit back for ten minutes compared to booting up your phone to check Facebook.
Know that you’ll look for the easy route. That’s okay, so long as you plan for it in advance. Make good habits easy and bad habits harder, and you’ll be a lot further along towards the habits you want to build.
3. Action is where change begins
We all judge each other. But we don’t judge each other on our ideas, plans, or thoughts. It’s our actions that really make a difference. When someone meets you for the first time, it’s the stuff you’ve done that impresses them, not what you talk about.
When someone’s thinking about hiring you, it’s your track record that they care about, not how you answer interview questions.
Taking action, making things, changing your situation: those are all impressive. We all love looking up to people who’ve done things we respect. We don’t care about what they say until they’ve proven themselves.
Crew CEO Mikael Cho proved this to himself when building healthy habits. Mikael found that regular exercise was a tricky habit to keep up, since his brain always found an excuse to keep him from exercising.
I love his example excuses because I can just hear my own mind making these up, too:
You haven’t eaten yet and you need energy before working out. Eat first, then you can work out.
You just ate and need to digest. Workout later.
You have too much work to do right now, so this workout needs to wait.
So how did Mikael find a way around the excuses? He took action.
He started small, and found the tiniest, simplest action he could take that would jerk his brain out of excuses mode and into action mode:
I got off my butt. My thoughts didn’t change.
I went to my closet and turned on the light. Still nothing.
But when I put my gym socks on, my thoughts shifted.
Rather than second-guessing if I should be working out right now, I started to think about the excitement of the workout.
If you’re struggling to get through your work you can use this method to boost your productivity as well. Find that one tiny step that pushes you past the phase of thinking about work and into action mode. When you feel your brain stop questioning whether you should be working or not, you’ve made it.
And once you’ve started taking actions you can build on what you’ve done before. Eventually you’ll develop a trail of actions you can point to for people to judge you (hopefully positively) on. And suddenly you’ll find people care a lot more about what you have to say.
As Sean McCabe says, your work is your credibility.
When Sean’s hiring, he asks five big questions about a potential employee’s track record:
- What have you done?
- What have you made?
- What have you written?
- Who have you helped?
- What problems have you solved?
Start answering these questions before you want anyone to listen to you or hire you by taking action.
4. You’re a creature of habit
Just like we’re drawn to convenience whether we like it or not, we’re also creatures of habit. We tend to fall back on the habits we’ve developed — both good and bad — whether we consciously built those habits or not.
If you’ve been going to the same supermarket for your groceries every week for a year, you’re probably going to keep going there in the future. Unless you have a particular reason to question that decision, your habitual instincts will take you there every week without needing a reason.
If you’ve been running at 6am every day for the past two years, you’ll probably keep that up. If you’re injured or sick and can’t go running in the morning, you’ll feel that. You’ll want to go running, because it’s what you’re used to. You’re drawn to that habitual behavior.
This is particularly obvious when we’re tired. When our willpower and energy are depleted, we subconsciously fall back on old habits. If you’ve got a habit of eating fast, convenient junk food, you’ll be more likely to do so when you’re tired. But if you’ve built up habits of healthy eating, you’ll lean on those habits when you’re tired.
The part I love about this principle is that if we put the effort into building healthy habits when we have the willpower and energy to work on them, we can relax in the knowledge that we’ll automatically fall back on those healthy behaviors when we don’t have the energy to force them.
5. Only experience can tell you what works for you
None of the advice I mention or the scientific studies I link to in my work can tell you what works for you specifically. Everyone is different, but scientific studies and surveys make generalizations based on a population of people.
One thing I’m constantly reminded of as I take on ideas from my own research is that not everything I discover will necessarily apply to me. And the only way I can know what works for me is to test everything.
Personal experiments are the best way to find out how different things affect you and what works best for your own circumstances, lifestyle, and goals. For instance, I’ve tried exercising in the mornings in an attempt to increase my energy during the day, but unlike the general population, a morning run just wears me out rather than energizing me.
Had I not experimented with that habit and taken notes of how I felt after a morning run and how it affected my day, I would have assumed morning exercise would increase my energy. Now I know better and I can schedule exercise when it suits me best.
General advice or study results are a great place to start, but make sure you always experiment with your own situation before deciding whether something works for you or not.
For my own writing, I’ve collected a lot of research and specific advice. And that’s not included all the reading I do, and all the research out there that I haven’t come across yet. There’s a lot to take in, and it can be hard to keep it all straight.
Keeping these general principles in mind has been the best way for me to improve my own habits and be more productive, healthier, and happier.
Image credit: Dakota Roos, mikecogh, Jonathan Kos-Read
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