9 Micro Habits to Fix Your Attention, Energy, and Happiness

If you want to get your life together, you have to start with small boring habits to fix the loops that create 95%

of our problems. I was once a homeless teenager, [music] trained as a monk, went to MIT, became a CEO, a board

member, and none of that was about dreaming harder. So, forget motivation. [music]

In this video, I'll walk you through nine micro habits backed by science >> [music]

>> that protect the three most important things your life runs on. Your attention, your energy, and your

happiness. Let's get into it. You have big, ambitious, exciting goals, so why are we talking about small boring little

habits? A very dear friend of mine has climbed Mount Everest twice. Now, I haven't seen him lately, so knowing him,

it may be three times by now. And I asked him what he remembered from his experience of the actual climb, and he

simply said, "You know, when you're climbing Mount Everest, don't look up. If you look up, the

mountain can break you. Because above 8,000 m, you enter what climbers call the death zone, where the oxygen

pressure is too low for the body to survive. So, every step becomes expensive. Your lungs are fighting, your

legs are burning, your brain does not have enough oxygen, so your judgment gets weaker." And his advice was once

again brutally simple. "Keep your eyes down. Take a step.

Then pause. Gather yourself. Then decide to take the next step. And what he was saying has a lot to do with how big

goals feel to us and our brains. [music] You want to train for a marathon, you want to write a book, build a business,

fix your finances. From far away, all these goals look daunting. And it's like climbing Mount [music] Everest. But what

we have to do is to break those goals down into specific steps. And then take the first [music] step.

And then pause and take the second step. This is where habits become so incredibly important because they can

stop our brain from pretending that we can climb the entire mountain all at once. So the idea underneath [music]

all these habits is to turn your ambition into a small set of actions. Now, you probably seen hundreds of habit

videos on YouTube. And they're all great and they have great ideas. Like stack your habits or put the phone away in the

next room when you're doing deep work. These are very useful ideas. But this video is not about focusing on those

habits that you already know. Cuz you've heard them many times before. We want to focus on the fundamental [music]

question. Which habits actually change the architecture of your life. Let's start with the three attention habits.

Our first habit is correct [music] after the click. You know when we're flying, the pilot puts the airplane on autopilot

mode once they reach the cruising altitude. And the plane is almost never exactly on course.

>> [music] >> Wind pushes it or the path curves. And the autopilot is constantly making these

small corrections. The plane doesn't fly in a straight [music] line. It flies in a series of recoveries.

>> [music] >> But it still gets you where you need to go, right? And our attention is very

similar to. Most of us try to catch the bad habit before it happens, right? [music] You tell yourself, "I will not

pick up my phone during deep work." Or "I will not eat that ice cream." Which is my weakness, by the way. But then you

do it anyway. Because well, clicking on that app has become a habit. Eating that ice cream has become [music] a habit. It

is now a reflex. But the new habit is this, correct after the click. The moment you notice the reflex has fired

after you have acted on it, attach a good habit. One useful action >> [music]

>> immediately after. So, let's say you clicked on the app. But then instead of using that app, just get up and get a

glass of water or [music] do deep breathing. That's the real window of opportunity. In a way,

you're interrupting the interruption. Make sure your action is small and easy to do because the last thing you need is

another mountain to climb when you've already slipped. So, that's our first habit. Let's move to the second

attention habit, controlling [music] your input. A psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik noticed something very

strange. Waiters [music] in a cafe could remember a lot of complex >> [music]

>> unpaid orders perfectly. But the moment the bill was settled, the order [music] vanished from their memory. She tested

it and found the same pattern in other professions, too. If something [music] is unfinished, your brain keeps reaching

for it. Every email you opened but didn't reply to, every meeting that ended without a clear next step, they

stay open in your brain [music] in the background. Like an app on your phone you forgot to close and is draining

resources. So, the habit of controlling the input has two steps. First, [music] do your process in batches. When I was a

CEO, I had two or three fixed windows a day, [music] 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 4:30 maybe, and that's when I checked emails

and Slack. If something was truly urgent, my team knew how to find me. But outside of those batches,

I gave myself my time. And second, when you're going through your batch of items,

>> [music] >> touch each item once, and only once. And this is a little difficult, and I have

[music] a decision framework that I call 4D framework, and it has four options: do

it, or delegate it, or date it, or delete it. So, for example, let's say you open

an email. Now, you have four options: >> [music] >> finish responding it, or forward it to

someone in your team, or snooze it, or get rid of it. Otherwise, that thing will linger on and on forever.

Controlling these inputs gives your brain [music] permission to put things down, to finish it. And by the way, if

you like to read more about such ideas, I write a short newsletter once a week. One useful idea, one tool,

>> [music] >> and one practice. You can subscribe below. I love writing them,

and it's free. The third attention habit is perhaps the most boring one: write to think. Jeff

Bezos built one of the strongest [music] and strangest meeting cultures in corporate America. At Amazon, senior

meetings often did not start with someone presenting a deck. They began in silence, [music]

because the executives would sit in the meeting room and read a written memo for about 15 minutes. Why do that? Because

Bezos believed that PowerPoint can hide sloppy thinking, but a written paragraph >> [music]

>> has to connect one thought to the next one. Writing a narrative creates more boring [music] work, but it also creates

more clarity. And it doesn't matter what you write, if it's journaling or gratitude diary or a business proposal,

writing things down by hand is the best way to clarify your thinking. And there is a difference between

writing and typing. Researchers from Princeton and UCLA found that students who wrote notes by hand performed better

on conceptual questions than students who typed [music] on laptops. Writing isn't just about recording what you

think. It helps you find out what you're thinking. [music] So, here's the small habit. Before a hard conversation,

before a big decision, before anything that feels foggy, >> [music]

>> try writing it down. Write three things. What do I know? What am I assuming?

What is the next honest action? In most cases, the fog will lift. You don't need to fill the page.

>> [music] >> You just have to empty your mind. So, those are the three attention

habits. Now, let's go to our first energy [music] habit. It is the smallest and the most dangerous one. Energy

doesn't always flow smoothly like a continuous stream. In 1900, a physicist named Max Planck discovered that energy

moves in these tiny [music] discrete packets. He called that packet a quantum. It was so radical an idea that

even [music] Planck himself didn't believe the mathematics behind it. But, that idea became one of the foundations

[music] of quantum mechanics. In fact, years later, the world learned the terrifying

version of the same idea. In 1945, the Manhattan Project did [music] something that changed the world forever. They

took the smallest thing in the nature, [music] the atom, and split it. And the energy released from that single act

destroyed two cities. Oppenheimer, the man [music] who led that project, watched the first test and quoted from

the Indian scripture, [music] Bhagavad Gita, >> Now I am become death,

the destroyer of worlds. >> The smallest unit in the nature holds the most power. That's why that is our

first energy habit, quantize the action. Break your habit into small [music] packets because the hardest part of any

habit is starting it. If you want to write a book, writing the first line is the hardest. If you want to clean up

your kitchen, picking up the first dish is the hardest. So, here's the action item. It's pretty simple. Quantize your

habit, writing one line, doing half a push-up, walking for 1 minute. It's all about reducing the force required to

start. Now, let's go to the second energy habit, something that even I don't like doing, but it must be done.

There was a study done in 2013 that tested the effect of caffeine at three different times before bed.

>> [music] >> Right before sleep, 3 hours before, and 6 hours [music]

before. And they found that caffeine that was taken even 6 hours before significantly disrupted your sleep.

Because caffeine has a half-life of about 5 or 6 hours. That means if you drink a cup of coffee at 4:00 p.m., half

of that caffeine is still circulating in your system at 9:00 p.m. And who knows, a quarter of it might still be there

after [music] midnight. So, you feel like you slept well, but you're not getting the deep [music] rest that you

needed. And then you wake up tired and groggy, and what's the solution? You reach for another cup of coffee, and the

cycle feeds itself. So, one habit I started [music] recently is to cut caffeine at least 6 hours before bedtime

because the most productive thing you can do for your career, your clarity, any relationships, is [music] to protect

your sleep. I love coffee, but the coffee that can save your afternoon can also sabotage your next morning. So, the

small habit is to have [music] a clear cut-off time for your caffeine. And the third energy habit is about riding the

waves. Your afternoon crash is not a failure. It's a signal. Your brain is not [music] a machine. A scientist named

Nathaniel Kleitman was a father of modern sleep research, [music] and he discovered that your brain doesn't just

cycle at night. It moves in cycles even during the daytime. Kleitman found that most of us have an 80 [music] to 120

minutes wave of high and low alertness. >> [music] >> He called them ultradian cycles. Peak

focus, then a dip. Peak, then a dip. All day long. That's how the brain is built. Now, the problem is our modern work

habits refuse to accept that idea. Our work days are still built to reflect the factory era. Go to the office, produce 8

to 10 hours of output non-stop, push through the dip, [music] drink coffee, push again, and then when our brain

collapses at 3:30 in the afternoon, we think, "Oh my god, I lack focus. I lack discipline." [music]

But, it's neither. It's just that our brain works in waves. [music] Every wave of effort needs a trough of

recovery. And here's the part most people get wrong. They take a break, [music] but then they fill it with more

input and stimulation. A real break has to [music] be a real break. Stand up and walk for 10

minutes. If you meditate, go ahead and do that. If you want to [music] do deep breathing, go ahead and do that. So,

here's the action item for the habit. Pick a focus block, >> [music]

>> maybe 60 minutes, maybe 90. Then, pick a real recovery block. [music] 10 minutes, 20 minutes with no feed, no inbox, no

new input. [music] Just recover. Then, write the next wave. And now onto

the happiness habits. >> [music] >> You know, when life gets heavy, I have

this small habit that seems completely useless. I go outside at night

and I look up. That's my favorite tiny habit because your story and mine [music] is the story

of the universe and it is a story 13.8 [music] billion years in the making. When you look up, you see billions of

galaxies each beaming with billions of stars. Any [music] one of them could hold planets like ours and here's the

strangest part. The sky that you're looking at is not a live telecast. Light takes time to travel.

Some of the stars you'll see tonight sent their light hundreds or even thousands [music] of years ago. Some of

them may have already died and we won't [music] know for centuries. We're looking at a memory from the past. The

stars above us are ghosts. Now, whether you believe in a religious explanation or a scientific one,

>> [music] >> the mystery, the miracle, and the magic of our existence in this

universe is undeniable. So, the first habit >> [music]

>> is to look up. And then comes the second move. Look at yourself in [music] the mirror and I mean really look. The same

atoms that made those stars above made you and me. We [music] are the same stardust.

There is no one like you on this planet. Your DNA, your exact [music] memories, your scars, your voice, your childhood,

your [music] private fears, there's only one version of you. By the time I finished speaking [music] this sentence,

roughly 30 million cells in your body [music] may have been replaced. I took roughly 8

seconds to say that. So, the math will [music] work out, but it's fascinating that you're changing every second and

yet [music] you feel exactly the same. Okay, so you're going to say, "Fine. >> [music]

>> What does this have to do with small habits and happiness?" Well, >> [music]

>> we just covered two important happiness habits. Because when you look up, you're reminded [music] that you're surrounded

by millions of miracles. And when you look [music] down, you're reminded that you're one of those miracles. Those two

habits [music] lead to awe and gratitude. Which then leads to the ninth and the final habit. [music]

The habit of forgiving yourself when all your habits break. Because they will break. Your [music] systems will break

and your dreams will shatter. All of that is inevitable. But don't get trapped in any spiral [music]

of shame. All of us have days and weeks where nothing is going our way, right? [music]

And when every day is a firefight, none of these small habits will survive. [music]

But that's okay. That is the point. You don't have to be your best self [music] on your worst

day. That kind of self-prosecution is way more exhausting than missing a habit.

>> [music] >> And that's why our last small habit is self-forgiveness. The three small

habits, awe, gratitude, [music] and self-forgiveness, are not about pretending that your

problems are small. [music] It is reminding that your life is [music] large.

The best habits don't keep you from getting lost. They help you

>> [music] >> find your way home. Thank you.

And I love you.