Forget big change, start with a tiny habit

Hi guys! What's up? It's me, Judy. Today, we're going to be talking about how to build any habit using the one percent improvement method. Everything will be time-stamped down in the description below, so let's get right into it.

So firstly, let's talk about what actually one percent improvement method is. Here, you can see the graph of a one percent improvement. What is the one percent improvement? It's actually very basic. That basically means getting better one percent every single day. When you do that for a year, you will be 37 times better than the start of the year. But when you continue your bad habits and repeat that for a year, you will be 0.03 times worse than the beginning of the year.

You might think, like, what is this graph? Like, what is this describing? The thing is, one percent improvements—like such tiny, tiny improvements—can drastically change your life. I'm not saying you to go crazy and do crazy stuff, but like doing small improvements can actually really change our lives. You might think this is just like a graph that Alter Road; this can't be true or something. Then here is a graph from Ali's PTYA community, which I'm attending. This is the growth of Ali Abdullah's channel. As you can see, these two graphs are very, very similar when you look into them.

I've been following Ali for about two years, and the thing that I know is that he's always improving something—maybe audio quality, maybe video quality, maybe the content, maybe the title, maybe the thumbnail, maybe the description below. He's always improving something by doing small changes—small, tiny! But every day, he got to the point where he is right now, as you can see the subscriber count of Ali Abdul. Every single action we take is actually what? For the person that we want to become.

Your weight is your lagging measure of your eating habits. Your network is your lagging measurements of your financial habits. Your knowledge is your lagging measurement of your learning habits. When I say like improving yourself, improving ourselves by one percent every single day, it actually seems pretty easy, right? But then why are we not doing that? Do you believe that you're one percent better than yesterday, or do you think that? Let me know.

When we talk about making habits, I asked on my Instagram. I think I did like a question kind of type of a box, kind of like this, and then asked you guys what your struggles are. Most of my followers said that they're having problems with building actually a habit and then following it. So, I decided to think why is it so hard to build a habit? For example, there are a lot of people smoking, eating unhealthy, not working out, getting very low quality and less amount of sleep than they actually need. Why are we doing that? Because the impact of them is invisible in a short period of time. If you skip a workout today, it wouldn't matter that much, actually, in the long run if you repeat your workout sessions. But maybe skip today? It wouldn't affect that much. Results don't come quickly, so we're likely to slide back to our old habits.

Unfortunately, the slow pace of change slides bad habits as well. If you procrastinate today, you will find time tomorrow. So now we know that repeating our bad habits will be enormous. Then how not to slide into our bad habits?

Habits are kind of like water. Think about water. The water boils at 100 degrees, right? And when you start to heat the water, it gets warmer and warmer. But it wouldn't boil at 90 degrees; it will boil at 100 degrees. And when you stop the water at the 90 Celsius degree point, it wouldn't boil. But just because it didn't boil doesn't mean that your heat was not there. It's actually saying the same with the habits; just because you're not getting the result, it doesn't mean that the effort that you're putting in is meaningless. You just have to wait until the degree comes to the 100 Celsius degrees. You actually have to hit the point where you will succeed.

Here is a graph of what we think should happen and the actual success process. As you can see, we think that success is something linear; however, at the beginning—maybe not at the beginning—like 90% of the time, you won't see the results until you hit the place. To prevent this, what we should do is focus on our systems rather than our goals. What do I mean by that? If you want to study, or if you want to learn a language, or if you want to become healthy generally, don't focus on that goal. Don't focus on that—like, let's say I want to lose like 10 kilos or something.

Don't focus on losing 10 kilos; focus on your system which will allow you to lose 10 kilos. For example, maybe working out, maybe eating a little bit healthy. If you forget your goal and focus only on your system, you will still succeed. But if you forget your system and focus only on your goal, you wouldn't succeed. Losers and winners have the same goal. Every Olympic player is willing to win, but some of them win and some of them lose. Why? They have the same goal, but they have a different system. So don't forget that—forget your goal and focus on your system.

Okay, so after talking about the one percent improvement method, let's now talk about the four fundamental laws of building habits. The first one is make it obvious, the second one is make it attractive, the third one is make it easy, and the fourth one is make it satisfying. I'll be explaining all of them, but as I said before, you can find a timestamp down in the description below so that you can skip to the part that you're interested in.

So the first law is make it obvious. Bringing awareness to your goals is very important. The more it becomes a habit, the more you notice it. Because sometimes, you actually don't notice that you have that habit—like maybe playing with your hair when you're talking, maybe like putting your hand to here when you're laughing. When other people don't say to us, we usually don't notice them. When you don't bring awareness to your habits, you would likely not notice them and continue doing those habits that you actually want to change.

So what you can do to bring awareness to your daily habits is to make a list kind of like this and write every single thing that you do after waking up and put plus, minus, or zero next to them according to the goals you want to achieve. So let me give an example: maybe eating fewer calories than you burn is a good habit for someone else who is wanting to lose weight, but it's not a good habit for someone who is wanting to gain weight. So give them marks depending on your goals, and then after making the list, check your list once again and decide if you should continue that habit or if you should break that habit.

If you're about to do a habit that you shouldn't be doing, say it out loud whenever you're doing it. For me, I want to become a productivity ninja so that Ali Abdul would be proud of me. So maybe scrolling through Instagram, like looking at random anime images, is not something productive to do. If I'm doing that for chilling, maybe it's good, but if I'm doing that to procrastinate from the work that I actually want to do, every single time I look at the Instagram feed, I should be saying, like, “I shouldn't look at the Instagram feed right now.” It sounds ridiculous, I know that, but saying it out loud brings more awareness to yourself, actually.

So now it's time for the second law, and that is make it attractive. We will be using a technique called implementation intention. So basically planning, using the implementation intention, you write the time and location like "I'll meditate at 7:00 AM in my bed." Like when situation X arrives, I'll perform Y so that you make your habits more obvious and build a system, and you bind the habits together.

Whenever you're building some sort of a routine—maybe morning, maybe night, maybe studying routine—maybe shopping original or something—connect every single habit. Basically, connect the desired habit to an existing habit. If you want to meditate, you combine it with making a coffee. I make coffee every single morning, and I want to meditate. Then, I'll combine these two and I'll say, "I'll wake up at 5 AM tomorrow. After waking up, I'll make a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and after making a cup of coffee, I'll meditate in my room." As you can see, I connected the desired habit and the already existing habit together so that the habit will become more attractive to me.

The third law of building a habit is make it easy. The more easier it is for you to perform a habit, the more likely you are to do that habit. Let's say you want to work out; you want to get fit. You want to get fit into that shape. You want to work out, and you want to build some muscle and stuff. So after every single work or school or whatever, you come back home, right? Change into your workout clothes so that it will be easier for you to work out. Make the things easier for you. Design your environment, especially if you're living alone; it's much easier for you to design your environment.

So make it easy for your habits to actually perform them. If you want to be productive and study, keep your desk always clean. If you want to read more books, put a book beside your bed so that it will be easier for you to read some books. So make the things easy for you.

So the fourth law of building a habit is make it satisfying. We love rewarding ourselves. We love getting rewards from our actions. I don't smoke, but a lot of people do smoke in the world because you don't get the punishment right away, but you get the reward right away. After you smoke, you get the relaxation; you get the de-stressed feeling. I don't know how it feels, but you get that after smoking a cigarette. You know that cigarettes aren't healthy for you, but you don't see the unhealthy side effects of cigarettes in the short run; you see them in the long run.

So after performing your desired habit, reward yourself. Let's say, because I didn't procrastinate on Instagram, I'll reward myself with blah blah blah. You can basically set a reward for whatever you want, but giving yourself a reward basically tells your brain that, "Oh, this action is actually good for you. You should repeat that more." You repeat that task, and the more you get rewards from that task, you're likely to do that action more and more and more.

So in order to continue the good acts in rewarding yourself, use a habit tracker. There are like tons of apps, as you can see here, that you can try so that you can see how many days you've been doing that. And try to not break the chain that you actually created, or maybe you can basically draw a chain to your calendar, like kind of like connecting them so that you won't break the chain.

Also, there is a rule that I've heard from Matt Balla and also from James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, talking about like a two days rule. That's a rule basically stating that you don't skip any habit that you want to perform. So let's say if you want to read books, don't skip reading books for two days continuously. If you skip today, you have to perform it tomorrow.

So now let's summarize the things that we talked about. The first thing is don't focus on your goal; focus on your system instead. The second thing is one percent improvements are crucial in who you want to grow. So we have four different laws for building habits. And the first one is make it obvious, the second one is make it attractive, the third one is make it easy, and the fourth one is make it satisfying.

These are the lessons that I learned from a book called Atomic Habits. You can check it in down the description below. I would highly, highly recommend you that book. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Let me see in my next video. Bye!