I'm Gretchen Ruben and this is a little happier.

As I often mention, I love all teaching stories,

co-ents, parables, aphorisms, maxims,

epigrams, proverbs, anything like that.

And this story is one of my favorites.

I write about it in my book Better Than Before,

which is all about habit change.

And in that book, I identified the 21 strategies

that we can use to make or break our habits.

And one important strategy is the strategy

of loophole spotting.

And loophole's matter, because when we try to form

and keep habits, we often search for loopholes.

We look for justifications that will excuse us

from keeping a particular habit in a particular situation.

But if we can catch ourselves in the act

of invoking a loophole, we can often avoid using them.

And that improves our chances for keeping the habit.

There are 10 categories of loopholes.

There are lots of loopholes.

And loophole category number 10 is the one coin loophole.

And this loophole gets its name from a teaching story,

...