Guy Reams (00:00.686)
Today's day 200 get small. So I like this phrase get small. I remember when I was a young boy, my father was listening to, I forget his name, some comedian. He'll come to me in a minute. I can't remember his name. It just slipped my mind. But anyway, he had a skit called Get Small. And my dad laughed a lot at it, but I didn't understand it. But.
So I've always remembered that as a childhood memory. So I put get small as my mnemonic for remembering this principle. So this is my second installment on three key principles for making life changing commitments. And the get small thing is best explained with what we call tiny habits. I talked to a Stanford researcher named BJ Fogg a while back ago. And.
He expressed to me some work he'd been doing on trying to figure out what is the key formula for people making and keeping habits. And he discovered that the biggest factor to get people to actually keep a habit is for it to be easy enough that they will do it every day. If they take something that's on that is that is reluctant for them to do, then they just won't do it.
Even though you might keep it up for a couple days the third or fourth day. You're just not going to do it anymore So that the the principle that he was proposing was that by lowering down the workload to be so easy that it's something that you will do every day that will build a life -changing habit
And his research, I saw happen in my own life. When I finally figured out that if I want to keep something up consistently, what I need to do is reduce it down to its lowest common workload, the simplest workload possible that I will do every day. Like, for example, I want to go to the gym every day. If I have this big, massive workout planned every day, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to fail. But if I have just go there and do
Guy Reams (02:14.798)
some simple exercises for five to 10 minutes and that's it, I'm out. That I'm more likely to do and once I've built the habit, then I can add more. So the idea of starting small seems obvious, but it's definitely something you need to consider. Now, is there a relationship between habits and commitments? Well, there absolutely is. I think there is a direct link between making and keeping a commitment,
and the habit that goes along with it. Every commitment that we make should be boiled down to one consistent habit that we do every day. Because something that we can do, commit to, that even though it's small, it's something that can gradually morph into consistent action. And that consistency of action will ultimately get us to what we want to do, which is our commitment. So,
Building habits and keeping commitments are together. Now, definite relationship. And with that relationship comes two what I consider very important laws of habits. The first is the law of accumulation. This is a powerful concept that when you make steady, slow improvements over time through habits, you slowly start to accumulate.
What was hard in the past will now become easy to you because you're doing it every day. It has a cumulative effect. Or if you have something that's very large to understand or overcome, if you do a little bit every day, you will eventually get to the point where the law of accumulation kicks in and you're more successful. So accumulation with small consistency is very important. The second is the law of iteration.
The idea of getting it all done in one shot is never going to fly. The idea of producing the perfect product is never going to fly. Rather, iteration is important because as we learn by small, consistent habits, we adapt, we change, we evolve, we improve, the process gets better. Pretty soon, what took us maybe 30 minutes to do will take us five minutes to do. Like for example, writing my blogs and doing some of the stuff I'm doing.
Guy Reams (04:36.238)
used to take me a long time, but over the process of iteration, I figured out how to keep my thinking straight, how to keep my writing fluid, how to get ideas flowing quickly. So I came up with all these mechanisms that reduce the time down significantly over time through each iteration, through each adjustment, through feedback and through failure. I've gotten to the point where I've learned from those and now I'm much more efficient.
So iteration is pretty important. It also starts to build momentum. As we build our skills, we get more efficient, more effective. The cycle of iteration produces more insights, more value to us, and we become much more effective, and therefore we have a lot more momentum. So this is the second installment. I think that tiny habits are very much part of the process of making, keeping commitments. Thank you.