The power of simple nudges.
Why discipline is BS and how to leverage nudges to be better.
Welcome to EFFIGIES, a weekly newsletter offering actionable insights from my journey through reading and writing comics, designed to inspire you toward building a better life. To become our best selves, we must burn away who we are today.
What’s Inside:
Why discipline is a myth and nudges are the real tools for success.
What is a nudge and what are the 3 steps for creating one?
Imagine this: You’ve finally started to make progress toward a goal. You’re writing every day. The number on the scale is going down. Then suddenly, something comes along and derails all your progress.
As someone who values making progress toward goals, I worry constantly about that big meal ruining my diet or a long cold disrupting my writing rhythm.
At least, I used to.
I was fortunate to spend most of the last few weeks traveling in Hawaii and Guatemala. Traveling, however, is like stepping into a different life. Your sleep gets disrupted by time zones, and your regular patterns of eating and exercise are tossed out the window. Anything productive you usually do at home becomes an afterthought.
The problem is, these new patterns tend to follow you home, making it harder to slip back into your regular productive routine. But after nearly three weeks away, I was able to return to my groove seamlessly. Let’s talk about how I did that.
The myth of discipline.
Before we do that, let’s dispel a common myth: willpower is bullshit.
Many people believe that discipline is the key to success. If only we had more willpower, we could achieve our goals. However, the truth is that discipline alone is not enough. We all have limited willpower, and relying solely on it can lead to burnout, failure, and regression.
Instead, building effective systems can be a far more sustainable and effective approach. Systems are designed to make the desired behavior easier and more automatic. By setting up the right environment and structures, we can reduce the reliance on willpower and make progress more consistently.
One way we can build better systems is by implementing nudges.
Nudges.
Because I knew I’d be away from home and off-schedule for a while, I started revisiting the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. One of the key insights from Nudge is the idea that small changes in our environment can significantly influence our behavior. This concept has profound implications for how we think about discipline and habit formation.
A “nudge” is a concept from behavioral economics that involves subtly guiding people towards a desired behavior without restricting their choices or significantly altering their incentives. It’s about making the preferred choice easier or more accessible, often through small changes in the environment or the way choices are presented.
For example, placing healthier foods at eye level in a cafeteria encourages better dietary choices without removing other options. In essence, nudges are designed to lead people to make better decisions naturally, leveraging our inherent biases and tendencies.
As a writer, I need to…write. When I travel, I take the opportunity to recharge, so I don’t write. But when I get home, I need to get my head right back in the game. For a long time, I struggled with this. My non-writing vacation schedule would follow me home and it would, sometimes, be days before I recovered some semblance of my prior daily schedule.
Then, I started implementing a nudge. Before a trip a couple of years ago, I set up a reminder in my Google Calendar that sent me a daily notification (M-F) at 9:45 am that it was time to write.
When that little alert vibrates my watch, I know it’s time to start context-switching and closing any open loops I’m currently focused on because in 15 minutes, I will be sitting down at my computer to write. If I will be traveling, I turn off this notification and it always resumes on the first full day that I am home after a trip.
And this newsletter is proof that the nudge works because here I am, at 10:27 am on Monday writing this newsletter, after ten straight days away from my regular writing schedule.
How to create a nudge.
In my experience, there are three core steps to creating a nudge for yourself:
The first and most obvious step is to choose the behavior you want to encourage. Chances are, you already know this. You want to do more or less of X.
Once you know the behavior you want to encourage, you need to determine a cue to prompt that behavior. I’m a big believer in the power of technology for this purpose. A simple calendar reminder that captures your attention can have a powerful influence on behavior, as in the case of my writing. I’d bet good money, too, that there’s already an app to nudge you for whatever your goal might be.
But your cue doesn’t, necessarily, have to be technology-driven. I’m very cognizant of what I eat. In particular, I track my daily protein intake religiously. And to remind myself to weigh my food, I simply leave my food scale on the counter next to the fridge. If I go to get something to eat, it’s impossible to not see the scale. And when I see it, it reminds me not only that I need to weigh my food, but also that I’m weighing for protein, specifically, thus prompting me to make sure I load up on protein-rich foods.
The last step is to implement your cue. Set up the notification on your calendar. Install the reminder app. Put the food scale next to the fridge. Once you’ve figured out the cue for the behavior you want to encourage, alter your environment to include that cue.
By implementing these steps, you can create a system that nudges you toward your goals, making the process more manageable and increasing your chances of long-term success. This approach not only helps you achieve your objectives but also makes the journey more enjoyable and sustainable.
What are the behaviors that reinforce your goals? What kinds of cues encourage those behaviors? How can you implement those cues in your everyday environment and increase your chances for progress and success? Consider these questions and answer them carefully. If you do, you’ll get where you want to be.
- Frank
I’m Frank Gogol, writer of comics such as Dead End Kids, No Heroine, Unborn, Power Rangers, and more. If this newsletter was interesting / helpful / entertaining…
You can also check out some back issues of the newsletter:
After credits scene.
In the spirit of nudges, here’s one from me to you: I’ve got a few friends who’ve seen advanced screenings of Deadpool & Wolverine and they’ve had nothing by heaping piles of praise for the movie.
I’ll be seeing it on Thursday. If superheroes, or the MCU, is you’re thing, you should, too.