Mark Manson

Now, the interesting fact about this checklist is it didn't teach anybody anything they didn't know.

It didn't force anybody to do anything they shouldn't already be doing.

It didn't motivate them or, you know, completely change the system.

It simply created an environmental nudge.

It basically created a design within the environment that made it easier to follow the protocol than it was to not follow the protocol.

And this is what we see time and time again, is that people change their behavior when it becomes more painful to not change the behavior than it becomes to change it.

We like to imagine that it's more complicated than this, that there's like all these, I don't know, philosophical, emotional, childhood trauma issues associated with it.

But at the end of the day,

If you can create circumstances and situations within your environment, if you can design the world around you to nudge you into a behavior so that it feels easier than not doing that behavior, something as simple as a checklist or a visual reminder or not putting junk food in the fridge, whatever it is,

This is the 80-20 of behavioral change.

Now, this is not a sexy or exciting thing.

I think what happens is that when people wanna change, we tend to think of the final order of fact of that change, right?

So it's like, if I wanna get healthier or if I wanna fix my relationships, I'm not thinking about

the next meal I'm gonna have or the next date I'm gonna go on.

What I'm thinking about is like me being married with kids and having a six pack, right?

I'm like, my brain is immediately jumping five years in the future after I've done 10,000 different things to make that outcome come true.

And so,

a natural cognitive bias that we have is that we assume that we need to change much more in our life than we actually need to change it turns out that not only are behavioral changes easily instigated by small alterations in our environment like a simple checklist but you don't have to change nearly as much as you think you do to create an outsized effect

down the line, five years in the future or whatever.

Now this is a mistake I've made a million fucking times.