Don’t Build Habits. Engineer Them.

Public speakers and best-selling authors, stay tuned to hear Paul Krismer and Jackson teach the practical science behind happiness and success. It was the night of the national championship. I was at the University of Alabama, I think it was my sophomore year, so like the biggest night of the year. We were playing Clemson, and the most popular bar had a line of probably 200 people, right? The cover charge to get in was like two or three hundred dollars. This line down the block, right? But, I wanted to get in so bad, like I just had to go in. I had my friends inside, there was a girl I was talking to inside or something, and like I want this so bad, I gotta get in there.

So, I tried to, I was thinking about like cutting the line, you know, can I just like kind of sneak in there? I thought about trying to pay the bouncer like 500 or something, but I didn’t want to spend that kind of money. I was looking at, like can I climb in there? Like can I go over the fence, or get up on the roof and like drop in there or something? I just want to get in so bad, so bad. But I realized that motivation wasn’t going to get me in there. I decided I had to use my creativity and my intelligence to find a way in.

So I looked across the street and saw this little restaurant, walked in, ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, got it to go, threw on a baseball cap, walked up to the bouncer and I say, “I got an UberEats for Sarah in the back,” and he’s like, “What?” I said, “Yeah, Sarah in the back, I think she’s a bartender or busing tables and she ordered UberEats. Can I just drop it off for her?” And he’s like, “Oh yeah, dude, go ahead, whatever.” I walk in there, I’m 20 years old at this point, just walk into the biggest bar, most popular bar on campus on the biggest night of the year. I ditch my hat, whip open my snack from the restaurant, and spend the night there. It was a pretty incredible night.

The reason I share that is because you can use this for more than just sneaking into the bar, right? You can use this to fundamentally change your quality of life. And it begins with this shift from motivation and willpower, what I call habit building, to habit engineering, which is using your creativity and your intelligence. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

So, my name is Jackson. I’m a happiness researcher, instructor, and former Zen Monk, and I have a thing for habits. I’m very particular about my own. I have this checklist with all of them marked off. This book, “Atomic Habits”, I have to recommend, I’ll link to it down below, by James Clear. I’ve probably read it like five or six times, and it’s actually the textbook for the course that I created and instructed at the University of Alabama, called “Happiness Habits 101”. So, for the next 10 minutes or so, I’m going to talk to you about this idea of habit engineering, so how to engineer your habits to be happier and higher performing.

There are really seven rules that go into this. First, I want to share with you that the way we think about habits is pretty much all wrong. Probably all the psychology, self-improvement, philosophy, whatever advice, 90% of it is totally worthless. Why? Because knowing isn’t doing, and that’s something that Laurie Santos talks about. She is a happiness researcher at Yale, she teaches the world’s most popular course on happiness, and in one of the first weeks, she talks about the GI Joe fallacy. And it gets its name because in the old cartoon, GI Joe, the main character always used to say, “knowing is half the battle.” In reality, knowing is like one percent of the battle, right? Because knowing something doesn’t mean we’re actually gonna do it. Knowledge without action is useless.

So, the reason it’s so important to focus on habits is because habits are the mechanism that actually converts knowing to doing. And that’s what we’re talking about with habit engineering, right? Going from habit building, which is trying harder, to habit engineering, trying smarter and making sure that the knowledge actually leads to action. So, as I mentioned earlier, we’re now going to get into these seven rules of habit engineering.

Number one is make it too easy. Number two is make a plan. Number three is track it. Number four is change your environment. So, we often focus all internal, but it’s just as important to focus externally. How can I change the world around me to make my behavior easier? When I was living as a Zen monk, I spent 90 days: no drugs or alcohol, vegetarian, no nicotine, and almost very little, maybe one day a week, using my cell phone. And it wasn’t because I was disciplined or so motivated. It is because I was in that different environment. So, for example, if you have trouble hitting snooze in the morning, try moving your phone across the room. If you want to eat more fruits and vegetables, eat healthier, keep a bowl of fresh fruit on your kitchen table or cut up vegetables in your fridge.

Number five is don’t allow zeros. They say eighty percent of success in life is just showing up. Well, I’ve got good news: a hundred percent of success in your habits is just showing up. So, the most important thing is to keep the momentum going. And importantly, if you do miss, recover. Missing once is a mistake, but missing twice starts a total new pattern, and it starts a downward spiral. So, focus on never putting up a zero. Just show up every single day. Or, if it’s a different style of habit, maybe three times a week or once a week, hitting it every week, every time you are supposed to do it.

Number six, tracking my habits, is reward yourself. So, use positive reinforcement, especially short-term rewards, to condition and build the habit. So, for example, I like to have my breakfast and morning coffee after I do my meditation. For that same meditation habit, you might have your checklist, and after you do 30 days straight of meditation, you treat yourself to a reward, like sleep in, or go out for a nice dinner.

Number seven, and I think this one is the most powerful, especially if you’re looking for immediate change, is to join a community, or a group, or an accountability partnership, to make your desired habit automatic. So, I wanted to start doing more public speaking. I joined a public speaking group that meets once a week, and I have to do it. I just show up, and it’s taken care of. You can partner with a close friend, and you both want to work on your habits together. You need someone else, or you better yet, a group to hold you accountable and make the behavior automatic.

So, as I said, the single most powerful of these rules, when it comes to affecting immediate change on your habits and your behavior, is joining a group, or changing the people you’re around, because this is really what makes the behavior automatic. So, I want to tell you about the Rewired Program. This is a one-month version of the Happiness Habits course that I taught at the University of Alabama. So, it’s a 30-day challenge. By the end, you’ll have built three new happiness habits, showing up every single day. I’ll be there every step of the way to coach you along. You’ll have access to a group of people doing the same thing, and all I ask is one dollar a day. So, it ends up being thirty dollars. For the rest of your life, three new happiness habits. I also offer habits-based coaching, and both of those, I’ll put links to down below.

What I want to leave you with is this: if your IQ and your motivation, kind of your overall capacity, are your engine’s horsepower, and your habits are the efficiency, how well is that power being translated into output? Is it going towards the right things? Ultimately, approaching your habits this way, it’s going to take your input and make your outputs more efficient, because your habits are what matter when it comes to happiness and high performance.