Mark Manson

But as we're gonna discover, willpower is generally overrated and overemphasized because it turns out that the human mind, we are very influenceable and susceptible to external triggers and influences within our environment.

And so if we're smart about using our environment and if we're smart about utilizing the triggers around us,

we can actually make it easier to adopt the behaviors that we wanna adopt.

So by the end of this chapter, everybody's gonna understand why simply knowing what to do and trying to force yourself to do it through willpower is not an effective solution.

We're gonna actually give everybody specific concrete tools to change their environment, to create triggers for themselves so that the right behaviors become automatic and far easier than they would be otherwise.

But to begin, I want to tell a story about a checklist and how it saved 1,500 lives.

So in 2003, doctors at one of the best hospitals in the world were unintentionally killing their patients.

What's worse is that the whole time they knew what they should be doing, they just weren't doing it.

So the problem was, is that a large amount of patients were dying from what is called central line infections.

So central lines are simply a catheter that are inserted into a large vein.

They're super common in ICUs.

They're like, basically, you see them happen everywhere.

But the problem was, was that the ICU was so chaotic and so crazy that...

Inevitably, some of these steps would be skipped and then the patients would develop an infection and then they would die.

So the doctor, Peter Provenos, noticed this and he decided to address it.

He addressed it in the most stupidly simple way possible, which is he created a checklist.

It was just a physical piece of paper with the five steps that all the doctors and nurses already knew that they should be doing.

And then he just made one change, which is that he gave all the nurses permission that if they noticed a doctor skipping any of the steps that they could stop him and intervene.

And within 18 months, deaths from central line infections dropped to zero.

In fact, the checklist became so successful that hospitals across the United States started adopting it everywhere.