You Procrastinate Because Of The Paradox Of Habit, Not Laziness

After spending thousands of hours studying, practicing and teaching learning how to learn, here is one of my top five hacks to help you grow faster...

Embrace the power of paradox (especially the Paradox Of Habit).

To set the context for the Paradox Of Habit, let me first explain why paradoxes, in general, are such a valuable learning tool.

Paradoxes are true things, which are confounding to you. And, in order for a paradox to make sense to you, you have rewire your mind at a fundamental level. That rewiring is how you grow.

The problem with most learning is that it doesn't expose you to things which challenge your beliefs, values, paradigms, and mental models of the world. In fact, social media is designed to feed you familiar ideas from familiar people . This happens because social media platforms sort the world's firehose of information based on three criteria:

1. Newness
2. Popularity
3. What you've liked in the past

In other words, every time you fire up your favorite podcast app, you see the latest podcast episode from someone you may have started following years ago. While these three filters provide a consistently interesting experience, they fail to maximize your learning. For example, what are the chances that out of all the world's information, the best of it happens to be produced in the last day?

If you wanted maximize learning, you would sort reality with the opposite filters. You would use the following criteria instead:

1. Best of all time (not the newest)
2. Most rare and valuable (not just the most popular)
3. What you didn't even know existed that blows your mind (rather than what you've liked or followed in the past)

In other words, in order to maximize your growth, you would filter the world's abundant information into paradoxes.

The power of paradox rests on four axioms:

1. The road to wisdom is not paved by bolstering our beliefs, but in the humble admission of what we do not yet comprehend.
2. Paradoxes are signs that there is a gap in our understanding of the world.
3. Looking for and confronting paradoxes provides the opportunity to fill those gaps.
4. Because, in a universe of order, our confusion is not a sign of the world's madness, but rather our own.

Paradoxes are so powerful that Zen Buddhism uses paradoxes (ie - koans) to induce new levels of spiritual growth by generating "great doubt" in one's pre-existing beliefs. Furthermore, the evolution of science is based on researchers finding anomalies that shouldn't exist according to current theories and then creating new theories that accommodate the old data and the new anomaly. On a deeper level, paradoxes that challenge our fundamental beliefs may actually be the fundamental mechanism of personal growth.

Paradoxes come in many forms—visual (see this article's cover image), scientific, hypothetical, life, and more. Below are some of my favorites:

• The more you give, the more your get
• You have to fail more to succeed more
• To specialize more deeply, learn more broadly
• The more you know, the more ignorant you feel
• To get more done, create more slack in your schedule
• Small boring steps can add up to magical feats over time
• The harder you try to sell someone, the less persuasive you are
• Abundance leads to new forms of poverty (ie - paradox of choice)
• The best way to go fast in the long run is to slow down in the short term
• We learn the most when we struggle and feel like we're learning the least.
• We can end up in place we don't want by making logical decisions .

In my humble opinion, the most interesting and important paradox to understand for success is the Paradox Of Habit.

Here's my 1-2-3 breakdown on it:

The Paradox Of Habit Explains Why Humans Suck At The Most Important Daily Habits

1. Habits are important because consistency is the necessary ingredient for all success

As the saying goes, 80% of success is just showing up.

Without consistent effort it's impossible to get mastery, get in shape, eat well, build deep relationships, etc. All the things we value require repetition over time. Just as happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure (Arthur Schopenhauer), success consists in frequent repetition of productive actions.

Good habits are leading indicators of success, because small, boring habits done consistently compound into incredible results.

Time is the enemy of bad habits and the faithful ally of good habits:

2. You'd think humans would be amazing at the key habits that lead to happiness, personal growth, and success

We humans are habitual creatures. Almost everything we do or think is automatic and habitual...

• We shop at the same stores over and over
• We browse the same websites over and over
• We take the same route to work over and over
• We park in the same parking spots over and over
• We buy the same items at those stores over and over
• We follow the same morning, work, and night routines over and over.

Research backs this up as well. As data on millions of people's web browsing behaviors, GPS locations, emails, phone conversations, and shopping patterns finds its way into research labs, the following consensus is emerging:

Human actions follow simple, reproducible patterns governed by wide-reaching laws. Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you’ll be much closer to the truth.

—Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in Bursts

Given our habitual nature, you'd think we would have evolved to easily follow habits that improve our life the most. But, we haven't...

3. Humans suck at the key daily habits

I'm talking about habits like exercising, sleeping well, eating well, stretching, deliberately learning , saving, spending quality time with loved ones, doing deep work, etc.

In short:

• Habits are key to success
• Humans are really good at habits generally
• Humans suck at some of the most important daily ones

Don't believe the paradox is true?

Then just consider the stats, which ultimately convinced me...

These Stats Introduced Me To The Paradox Of Habit

• 22.9% of US adults meet the minimum exercise guidelines recommended by the Center For Disease Control (CDC).
• 41.9% of adults in the United States are obese.
• 27.8% of US adults (45-64 years old) live in chronic pain.
• 1 in 3 older adults take something to help them sleep.
• 11.1% of European adults set aside time for learning on a monthly basis.

These stats are damning (and getting worse). As a result of not consistently exercising, eating well, learning, and stretching, hundreds of millions of people die prematurely, live in chronic pain, are more at-risk in their careers or against future pandemics.

And the results are all preventable. For example,?to reach the minimum recommended dose of exercise, the CDC recommends just 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity per week. In other words, there are 10,080 minutes in a week. People need to spend just 75 of those minutes (.44% of the week) on vigorous exercise. Yet only one of five people do this. The same sort of pattern exists with learning, diet, sleep, etc.

This all begs a major question...

Why are we so bad at the most important daily habits?

More specifically, why are we so bad at these habits when we know how important they are, we know how to do them, and they aren't time intensive?

To answer these questions, we first need to understand the two properties of the habits we have trouble following:

Stubborn Habits Are Important Habits That Hard To Be Consistent At

I first heard about the idea of stubborn habits from my friend and author Al Pittampalli .

When we think about the nature of habits, many people assume that it takes roughly 50 repetitions for something to become an automatic habit we can easily do. While this may be a rough average for all habits, it does not apply to stubborn habits.

Stubborn habits are not only hard to start, they are hard to maintain, even after 50 repetitions. Therefore, even if we're consistent at them for a year, a small disruption in our life can quickly take us back to zero. Said differently, it's just as easy to break a stubborn habit as it is for an alcoholic to relapse. There's always a vulnerability.

For example, many professional athletes who spend years training every day are just as vulnerable as everyone else once their career ends and don't have a support system. Mike Tyson, one of the greatest boxers of all-time, is just one example.

Speaking from my own experience of extended friends and family, stubborn habits explain why someone who is pre-diabetic keeps eating sugar, and it explains why someone dying of emphysema keeps smoking.

Stubborn habits typically have the two following qualities:

1. Stubborn habits are not urgent. In other words, there isn't an immediate, guaranteed, and obvious consequence if you don't do it. In addition, there isn't an immediate, guaranteed, and obvious benefit if you do. For example, if someone has an urgent deadline that they could get fired for, they'll likely ignore non-urgent, important habits like sleep and exercise to get things done on time.
2. Stubborn habits are hard to do. For various reasons, stubborn habits are hard to do. They could trigger a competing commitment, be outside your comfort zone, require not doing an addictive habit, take a lot of energy to perform, be boring, or something else. For example, as much as I eat salads, my tastebuds would prefer eating a brownie. In any given moment, I'd prefer to relax than go for a jog.

This is why so many people either don't start stubborn habits, or when they do why they don't remain consistent.

Now that we have a better understanding of stubborn habits, the question arises...

How do we get consistent at stubborn habits?

Below are my personal takeaways:

Takeaway 1: People who procrastinate are not lazy

When we procrastinate, we often blame ourselves. Therefore, when procrastination becomes a habit, we tend to conclude that we're just a lazy person.

The stats above suggest that procrastination is not the exception, it is actually the norm. It suggests that there are external forces that impact all humans (even the most ambitious ones), not just you.

This means we can let ourselves off the hook and stop saying, "I should've done X." Rather we can start to ask a different question,

Somehow some people have figured out a way to be consistent at stubborn habits. What have they uniquely done, and how can I replicate it?"

When we ask ourselves this question, one rarely discussed approach becomes obvious.

Takeaway 2: Beat stubborn habits with the support of others

Over the past few years, there have been several research-backed bestselling books that have emerged that provide frameworks for conquering habits.

I'm a big fan of James Clear's simple model for setting habits:

1. Make it obvious
2. Make it attractive
3. Make it easy
4. Make it satisfying

I'm also a big fan of the WOOP framework , which is based on 100+ academic studies. When setting a goal, you should:

• Wish: What's your goal?
• Outcome: What's does achieving the goal get you?
• Obstacle: What obstacles will likely get in your way?
• Plan: What's your plan to achieve the goal and overcome the obstacles?

Other frameworks I recommend are from The Power Of Habit , Tiny Habits , and The Procrastination Equation .

I've found each of these frameworks helpful for habits in general. At the same time, they're not enough to meet challenges of stubborn habits.

First, I know this from my research. When you examine the most consistent people in the world at the most challenging stubborn habits, there is one unique thing that almost always exists, which is barely mentioned in the books above. That thing is adding a social support.

Second, I know from personal experience. Over my years as an entrepreneur, procrastination has been one of my biggest challenges. Early in my career, I realized I was resisting the most important, daily tasks necessary for success, and it was costing me dearly. I was deep in debt. Bankruptcy was a real possibility. After years of struggling and experimentation, I finally found something that has been working for me every single time for years—a specific type of social accountability call.

We humans are social creatures, and we act completely differently when we're around other people. We even act differently when we think people might be watching (observer effect).

Just consider the following examples that demonstrate the power of adding social accountability:

• How often have you missed an appointment with a therapist, coach, or personal trainer? Compare that to how often you've missed an appointment with yourself.
• Even though you may have thought that school was boring, you still went consistently.
• The most proven approach to alcoholism is the group support of AA.
• All professional athletes have peers, fans, competitors, and coaches which make it almost impossible to slack.

I personally realized the power of social accountability after college when I was $20,000 in credit card debt (not to mention school debt) and making $20,000 per year. I needed to do sales for my business, but I kept on procrastinating on it despite the dire circumstances. It wasn't until I formed an accountability group that I became consistent and the business immediately turned around. The next year I made a $100,000. Then $250,000. Then $700,000. Then over $1 million.

This social accountability was so powerful, I have now literally organized thousands of calls in dozens of formats in order to stay accountable as a parent, husband, entrepreneur, learner, exerciser, and writer.

While social accountability is powerful, especially when you can afford one-on-one coaching or when you have a social group you can easily join, most people don't have the money or network to have social accountability in every area of their life that needs it. I've particularly noticed this lack of a network in the field of learning and writing—my two specialties. Every time I ask my students if they have people they can go to as a sounding board, almost no one has anyone they can reach out to.

So the question becomes, what is the best way to build an accountability group for stubborn habits when you don't have people to ask and don't know the best format to use...

Introducing The Free Month To Master Bootcamp

After thousands of accountability calls, I eventually settled on a format and created a program to help people instantly tap into a community of learners/writers on a daily basis no matter where they are in the world.

Our program is called Month To Master . Here's how it works:

• At the beginning of the month, you select a micro-topic.
• Next, you build a curriculum to master that topic.
• Then, you join a daily 90-minute co-learning call to deep dive on a resource. At the end of the call, you share what you've learned with someone else on the call to deepen the learning.
• At the end of the month, you combine everything you've learned into an article.

Our next Month To Master starts on Monday, April 3rd.

To help you sample what one of the calls is like, I created a special free program...

Join Our Bootcamp on Friday, March 3rd For Free

Here's how the bootcamp works:

• You come to the call with a book you really want to deep dive on, but have been procrastinating on.
• I teach you my proven method to quickly and easily extract the main ideas of any book in less then an hour.
• You deep dive on the book using the methodology you just learned.
• You share what you learned with someone else on the call in order to deepen your takeaways (see Explanation Effect ).
• Then, you turn what you learned into a short article / book summary that you publish by the end of the call.

If you like how this sounds, I'd love to invite you to join us...

Register For The Free March 3rd Month To Master Bootcamp >>

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Special thanks to Max Bernstein for helping brainstorming this article.