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Because our environmental factors are so often outside of our control, we may think there is not much we can do about them. We feel like victims of circumstance. Puppets of fate. I don’t accept that. Fate is the hand of cards we’ve been dealt. Choice is how we play the hand.
The pain that comes with regret should be mandatory, not something to be shooed away like an annoying pet. When we make bad choices and fail ourselves or hurt the people we love, we should feel pain. That pain can be motivating and in the best sense, triggering—a reminder that maybe we messed up but we can do better. It’s one of the most powerful feelings guiding us to change.
Our inner beliefs trigger failure before it happens. They sabotage lasting change by canceling its possibility. We employ these beliefs as articles of faith to justify our inaction and then wish away the result. I call them belief triggers.
The Great Western Disease is “I’ll be happy when …” This is our belief that happiness is a static and finite goal, within our grasp when we get that promotion, or buy that house, or find that mate, or whatever.
Getting better is its own reward. If we do that, we can never feel cheated.
We believe that we can occasionally lapse back into bad behavior because people aren’t paying close attention. We are practically invisible, triggering a dangerous preference for isolation. Even worse, it’s only half true. While our slow and steady improvement may not be as obvious to others as it is to us, when we revert to our previous behavior, people always notice.
If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us. And the result turns us into someone we do not recognize.
This is how feedback ultimately triggers desirable behavior. Once we deconstruct feedback into its four stages of evidence, relevance, consequence, and action, the world never looks the same again. Suddenly we understand that our good behavior is not random. It’s logical. It follows a pattern. It makes sense. It’s within our control. It’s something we can repeat. It’s why some obese people finally—and instantly—take charge of their eating habits when they’re told that they have diabetes and will die or go blind or lose a limb if they don’t make a serious lifestyle change. Death, blindness, and
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Paradoxically, the big moments—packed with triggers, stress, raw emotions, high stakes, and thus high potential for disaster—are easy to handle. When successful people know it’s showtime, they prepare to put on a show.
The would-be good son who plans to call his mother every Sunday without fail is not the doer who misses a couple of Sundays because calling one or two Sundays a month is “good enough.”
It’s not just environmental intrusions and unpredicted events that upset our plans. It’s also our willful discounting of past experience. We make plans that are wholly contradicted by our previous actions. The planner who intends to make a deadline is also the myopic doer who forgets that he has never made a deadline in his life. The planner believes this time will be different. The doer extends the streak of missed deadlines.
The boxer-philosopher Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” As we wander through life, what punches us in the face repeatedly is our environment.
To avoid undesirable behavior, avoid the environments where it is most likely to occur.
She reproached herself for not anticipating this and for behaving so insensitively. But making mistakes is how we learn.
The wheel is equally useful one-on-one. Even if we’re alone in a dark and quiet room, intent on contemplating our future, we’re still being distracted by the competing voices mumbling and shouting inside our heads. Posing big-picture questions to ourselves crowds out the distracting voices and shuffles the niggling issues and daily nuisances that upset us to the back of the line, where they belong.
employees who have a sense of “making progress” are more engaged than those who don’t. We don’t just need specific targets; we need to see ourselves nearing, not receding from, the target. Anything less is frustrating and dispiriting.
Active questions reveal where we are trying and where we are giving up. In doing so, they sharpen our sense of what we can actually change. We gain a sense of control and responsibility instead of victimhood.
This “active” process will help anyone get better at almost anything. It only takes a couple of minutes a day. But be warned: it is tough to face the reality of our own behavior—and our own level of effort—every day.
Expressing gratitude is preserving.
The point is, your Daily Questions should reflect your objectives.
Trying is more than a semantic tweak to our standard list of goals. It delivers some unexpected emotional wallops that inspire change or knock us out of the game completely.
At the start of any self-improvement project, when our confidence is high, that’s a reasonable assumption. But in a world where we are superior planners and inferior doers, it rarely works out that way.
When I go through this Daily Questions exercise in classes, I hit people with one of my most confident predictions. “Within two weeks,” I announce, “half of you will give up and stop answering the Daily Questions.” Then I explain that it’s not just that they’ll slack off on a few of their goals. They’ll give up keeping score altogether. They’ll abandon the entire process. That’s human nature, I say. In every group, not everyone can get A’s, even if people are scoring themselves. Some people will try harder than others, creating a hierarchy of effort. I am confident in my prediction because I
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That’s the secret power of daily self-questioning. If we fall short on our goals eventually we either abandon the questions or push ourselves into action. We feel ashamed or embarrassed because we wrote the questions, knew the answers, and still failed the test. When the questions begin with “Did I do my best to …” the feeling is even worse. We have to admit that we didn’t even try to do what we know we should have done.
One of the unappreciated benefits of Daily Questions is that they force us to quantify an unfamiliar data point: our level of trying. We rarely do that. We treat effort as a second-class citizen. It’s the condolence message we send ourselves when we fail. We say, “I gave it my best shot,” or “I get an A for effort.”
But man or woman does not live by juice alone.
So are social media sites that ask us to sign a “contract” to change our behavior and use our credit card to penalize us financially (for example, donating to a favorite charity, or more chilling, to a cause we loathe)
(Can you remember the moment when you initiated your first significant adult behavioral change? What triggered it? How well did you do? A better question: Have you ever actually changed your behavior as an adult?)
Our extrinsic motivation gets shaky only when we achieve these targets—and wonder why they haven’t provided the meaning, purpose, and happiness we were hoping for.
When we wake up in the dark morning hours to hit the gym, or run a weekly meeting so that it ends on time, or leave work with a clean desk, or remember to thank our colleagues for helping us, we’re displaying self-discipline—repeating positive actions consistently. When we deny ourselves that which we most enjoy—whether it’s stifling the urge to crack wise at someone else’s expense or saying no to a second helping of dessert—we’re displaying self-control.
More than anything, Daily Questions neutralize the archenemy of behavioral change: our impatience.
At a slightly more sophisticated level, a coach instills accountability. In the self-scoring system of Daily Questions, we must answer for our answers. If we’re displeased, we face a choice. Do we continue suffering our self-created disappointment, or do we try harder?
Griffin knew she was right. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. He was out of line if he expected her, not him, to change. Admitting the problem was a good first step.
If he created the problem, he could solve it.
I have a first principle for becoming the person you want to be. Follow it and it will shrink your daily volume of stress, conflict, unpleasant debate, and wasted time. It is phrased in the form of a question you should be asking yourself whenever you must choose to either engage or “let it go.” Am I willing, at this time, to make the investment required to make a positive difference on this topic?
“Every decision in the world is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that.”
We Do Not Get Better Without Structure
Alan, who had spent his entire career building jet airplanes, had an aeronautical engineer’s faith in structure and process.
The social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister coined the term ego depletion in the 1990s to describe this phenomenon. He contended that we possess a limited conceptual resource called ego strength, which is depleted through the day by our various efforts at self-regulation—resisting temptations, making trade-offs, inhibiting our desires, controlling our thoughts and statements, adhering to other people’s rules. People in this state, said Baumeister, are ego depleted.
When we follow an unshakable wake-up routine, or write down an agenda for our meetings, or stop at the same coffee shop before work, or clear our messy desk before opening up the laptop to write, we’re surrendering to our routine, and burning up less energy trying to be disciplined. Our routine has taken care of that.
I can’t have enough structure in my day. I only wear khaki pants and green polo shirts to work (to add discipline to my shaky fashion sense). I pay a woman to call me with my Daily Questions (to discipline my self-awareness). I delegate all travel decisions to an assistant and never question her choices (to discipline my time). It’s an irresistible equation: the more structure I have, the less I have to worry about. The peace of mind more than compensates for whatever I sacrifice in autonomy.
The hour that you spend in the meeting is one hour of your life that you never get back. If you are miserable, it is your misery, not the company’s or your co-workers’. Why waste that hour being disengaged and cynical?
I don’t always grade out summa cum laude. Some evenings I eat the dessert anyway. But I don’t forget to test myself hourly, and doing so reminds me that I am not an unconscious victim of my environment.
The problem begins when this good enough attitude spills beyond our marketplace choices and into the things we say and do.
The mustard on a sandwich can be good enough. But in the interpersonal realm—we’re talking about how a husband treats his wife, or a son deals with an aging parent, or a trusted friend responds when people are counting on him—good enough is setting the bar too low. Satisficing is not an option. It neither satisfies nor suffices. It disappoints people, creates distress where there should be harmony, and taken to extremes, ends up destroying relationships.
The takeaway: If your motivation for a task or goal is in any way compromised—because you lack the skill, or don’t take the task seriously, or think what you’ve done so far is good enough—don’t take it on.
At home—whether we live alone or have a family—the structures and motivators vanish. We’re free to be anyone we want to be. And we don’t always aim high enough.
Most of us don’t notice our episodes of noncompliance, although we quickly spot them in others. It’s the other guy who breaks a confidence, or litters, or texts while driving. Not us. We would never do that.
“Why should I have to do all the work? If he doesn’t make an effort, the hell with it.” “Go eighty percent of the way,” I said. “See what happens.”
We waste time on issues we don’t feel that strongly about. We think, “It would be nice if I called my mother.” But if it really mattered to us, we would do it, instead of mulling it over, making the occasional call, but never committing in a way that’s satisfying and meaningful. We wish instead of do.
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