599 - How Friction Can Help You Change Your Life
Tiny Leaps, Big Changes
Gregg Clunis
4.3 • 920 Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2020
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, we look at the role that friction plays in personal development.
Sponsor: http://blinkist.com/tinyleaps
The Problem:
How many times have you thought to yourself, “I can’t seem to stop drinking soda, I just don’t have the willpower” Or maybe you blame it on a “sweet tooth.” Or you’ll say something like “If I weren’t so lazy, I would exercise more.”
Statements like this, whether we intend them to or not, reinforce an idea that our bad habits are determined by a set of characteristics we were born with. Our habits are fixed because “that’s just how I am.”
Let me make something clear – you were not born lazy, or unorganized, or with a sweet tooth. You developed those attributes later in life through a combination of factors but they are not inherently a part of who you are.
This means you can break them.
Digging Deeper
In 1936 Kurt Lewin formulated the statement: “Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment.”
Lewin, who earned the unofficial title the founder of Social Psychology, was a German American psychologist born in 1890.
Lewin took a complex subject – what drives human behavior - and broke it down into one sentence. “Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment.”
It is a formula for understanding how positive life changes can come about and highlights just why bad habits can be difficult to break.
So if behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment then there are two things that can be changed. The Person or the Environment.
The Solution
Whatever habit you want to change, one way to start is to look at how you could either increase or decrease the amount of effort, or friction, it takes to make it happen.
In this way you do not have to rely on willpower and can instead tap into the power of our unconscious behaviors.
We may take the brain for granted on a day to day basis but it uses an enormous amount of energy. This is why our brain takes tasks and turns them into habits. By shifting the burden over to the sub-conscious we use less energy while still allowing those tasks to be accomplished.
QOTD: What was the last show you binged on netflix or another platform? -> http://instagram.com/tinyleaps
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In this episode we look at how friction can be used to help you change your life. |
| 0:08.0 | Get excited because this is tiny leaps. Leaps. |
| 0:13.0 | Big. Welcome to another episode of Tiny Leaps. Big Changes, where I share simple strategies you can use to get more out of your life. |
| 0:38.0 | My name is Greg Klunis and in this episode I want to cover a topic that has sort of been at the core of a lot of the things I talk about on this show over the last few years, but I've never quite had the understanding in the context to bring it |
| 0:57.0 | to a full episode and I think it's really important it has to do with how friction, friction as far as how difficult it is to engage in something |
| 1:06.8 | can help us massively in changing our lives. |
| 1:11.2 | Now speaking of friction, one habit that people tell me they want to add to their |
| 1:15.8 | toolbox is reading. And there's massive value. I think we all know this in reading more, |
| 1:21.6 | but we don't always have the time to sit down and make it through a whole book. |
| 1:26.2 | So let me give you my secret weapon. |
| 1:28.2 | It's called Blinkist, and it's absolutely one of the best apps out there for helping people grow and improve as individuals. |
| 1:36.0 | Blinkist gives you the best key takeaways, the need to know information from over 3,000 non-fiction bestsellers into over 27 categories. |
| 1:46.6 | Blinkist condenses them down into blinks, which you can read or listen to in just 15 minutes. |
| 1:53.4 | Now I personally spend a lot of time learning new things, |
| 1:56.4 | stuff that sometimes makes it into the show, |
| 1:58.7 | like the stuff we're talking about in today's episode, |
| 2:01.3 | and stuff that doesn't sometimes. but Blinkus has been a massive |
| 2:05.0 | help in letting me do that consistently without spending hours going through every single |
| 2:11.4 | book on the very wide range of topics that I'm interested in. |
| 2:14.8 | Instead, I can check things out on Blinkist, go through a few blinks in 15 minutes each, |
| 2:20.4 | and then decide which books I want to sit down and invest a bit more time into. |
| 2:25.0 | Now two books that I would recommend, they're on my to read list is Sapiens, a brief |
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