Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How to Break and Make Life Changing Habits

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

"Your habits end up shaping what kind of person you become. And they're small little choices that happen over and over and over throughout your life." You might not give much thought to habits but what about lifestyle? They're really the same thing. Small habits build up and shape how you live your life. But making and breaking habits can be challenging, life-changing. And changing your life isn't easy! Get some tips from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith) as they share some of their habits, hacks, and other helpful resources. Also, make sure to scroll down and check out those resources below. Interested in more content like this? Listen to our episode on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-to-beat-digital-distraction/ (How to Beat Digital Distraction). Want to learn more about faith and work? Read this interview with Patrick Cox of Veterans united on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/stories/how-to-talk-about-your-faith-at-work-an-interview-with-patrick-cox-of-veterans-united/ (How to Talk About Your Faith at Work). Also, check out our website for more content on https://info.thecrossingchurch.com/faith-and-work (following God in your vocation). To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. On today's episode, Patrick and I are going to talk about a topic that is really interesting us lately, and that is habits. How do you develop good habits? How do you break bad habits? What are the implications of keeping habits around that you'd rather get rid of? How do habits form our character and the kind of people that we become? And I think a lot of this has come out of our personal reading, a book called Atomic Habits by a guy named James Clear. There's a book called Tiny Habits, another one, The Power of a Habit.

So there's a lot of literature that's been around the last several years on it. And so let's start with this, Patrick. Are there some habits that you would like to either establish, like good habits, or maybe some bad habits you'd like to break? I've definitely got both. Bad habits that I want to break. I feel like I'm going to step on your toes when I say this. but I have a sweet eating problem, and so I would love to stop eating sweets at night. Whatever sweet eating problem you have looks small compared to my issues.

I'm confident that's the truth. That has to be true. So what do you do? You eat them while you watch Netflix or The Bachelor or what? Well, if I make a pan of brownies at night, I will eat probably a third of them, maybe half. You never know how far I'm going to go. I've been known to drive out to Snooks to buy gooey butter. I get the kids down and I'm in the car. I was like, where were you? I don't know.

I was in the garage doing something. I'm trying to hide it. You're duplicitous about your bad habits. Oh, she knows. She knows what I disappear after the kids go down. She's like, you get some gooey butter. Do you bring some back for her or just? Oh, she can have some, but she's actually responsible.

Oh, okay. She has some good habits. I'll tell my good habit, but not what about you? So I have a similar habit. I mean, not just eating sweets at night, but pretty much all the time. And I like to make brownies. and so I thought I'm going to try to put into practice some of the things I've learned. And so I'm going to try to stop eating the brownies.

Now, I don't usually make the whole brownie. I usually just stop at the batter. We go through about six boxes of brownies a week. No. No, I really had no idea. It was not that. Six boxes of brownies. I make double boxes.

I mean, if you're going to make some, might as well make more, right? So anyway, I decided, okay, I'm going to try to stop doing that. And so what I did is, and we'll talk about this a little bit. later, but I learned you need to make things like that harder. So if you don't want to make brownies, don't buy brownies because unlike you, I won't actually go to the grocery store at night to get the brownie batter. The mix, I mean, to make it, I just won't do it. So Christine, I tell her, please, let's don't buy brownie batter mix anymore. All right. So then what do I do, though? I have the same craving for sweet, and I'm going around looking to the refrigerator and the pantry,

and I see there's butter, and then I look at it with the pantry and there's sugar. So what I do is I take scoops of butter. I put it in a bowl. I melt it for about 20 seconds. And then I pour in sugar. Could be white or brown. And I like white sugar a little better, though. And I put it in there.

I mix it up. And then I just eat it with a spoon. I hope no one is eating while they're listening to this. That's disgusting. The funny thing is is Christine didn't know I was doing that. And so I'm not the only duplicitous one here. She's like, how come I can't keep butter in this house anymore? I can't buy so much butter.

And it just disappeared. And then I had to admit that I had found it. So anyway. Do you use salted or unsalted better? Whatever she buys. I think it's salted. I don't know. I don't think it matters.

Anyway, once you put that much sugar in there, you don't taste the salt. Trust me. So I have got a lot to learn about habits. You said you had a good habit you wanted to establish? I used to be more in a habit of working out in the mornings. But as someone with young kids, myself decided. Blame the kids. Yeah.

It's the dang kids fault. This one's legit. I know you don't believe me, but this one is legitimate. And now that my kids are in a more regular pattern of sleeping at night, I think I could actually wake up early and be confident how that I could go to the gym and get back before they were up and running around. So maybe you've got some habits like us that you want to establish. Maybe it's a habit about Bible reading or prayer or maybe you have some habits that you

want to stop doing. And maybe those two are related. In other words, maybe what you want to do is stop or limit your TV watching. and maybe that has some relationship with your Bible reading or your prayer or your involvement in a small group or something like that. Or maybe you have some habits about phone and using your phone, how often you use it like we talked about in our distraction episode last week. I think that's exactly right. And tiny little things can really change our trajectory in life. I thought kind of an interesting illustration out there comes from the world of British cycling. I will confess, I don't know anything about cycling, but I found the story interesting.

for the longest time, British cyclists were among the worst. They hadn't won any serious competitions and something like a century. But in the mid-2000s, they hired a new coach. And this new coach, his job was to turn the whole program around. And the way that he did it was by what he called an aggregation of marginal gains. In other words, he said, we're just going to make lots of tiny little, just very small improvements. And we're going to trust by that aggregation of marginal gains. we're going to change the trajectory of our whole team. So he does all kinds of interesting stuff. He gets new massage gels to improve muscle recovery.

They hired a surgeon to teach everybody on the team how to properly wash their hands so that no one would ever get a cold during race. They find someone who's going to help each rider pick the perfect pillow, the perfect mattress so that they can get the best night of sleep. They even paint the entire inside of all of their buses white so they can catch any tiny little specks of dust that might end up inhibiting their bikes because they're so finely tuned. And this tiny little aggregation of marginal gains, it had a tremendous effect on the team.

Within a period of five years, they were the best cycling team in the world. They were winning every competition that was out there. And I think of the same thing is true of us. Small little things, small, tiny little habits, they're going to shape the direction, the trajectory, for ill or for good, of our lives. So your habits end up shaping what kind of person you become, and there are small little choices that happen over and over and over throughout your life. For example, let's say the first thing you do in the morning is pick up your phone and scroll through your social media or through different websites. Doing that on one day is not a big deal. But if that becomes a habit so that your norm becomes when you wake up, you reach and grab for your phone.

And that begins to shape your worldview and what story you live your life out of. And that becomes a really big deal. Good habits are really hard to establish. bad habits are really hard to break. So let's talk for a second about what makes building habits so hard. I think the first thing that comes to my mind is partially that we are currently living in a cultural moment that at times kind of pokes fun of, makes light of people who are disciplined or have habits.

I used to do college ministry, and the single character trait that every college student I met with wanted to have was this. They all wanted to be chill. The coolest thing you could do is be chill. You didn't care too much. You didn't work too hard. You're just chill. I think about other things in culture.

the whole treat yourself thing, right? It's, hey, you don't need to be disciplined. You need to take care of yourself. That's what you need to do. Or I think about things like the normalizing of TV binging. If you actually think about how weird it is to watch 10 TV shows in a matter of one or two days and realize the fact that a lot of people actually do that, it just shows that culturally we are pretty okay with and we even encourage one another to have bad habits. One reason that habits are hard to establish or break is because we often focus on the result. So what that might mean for you is that you go out for a run and you don't feel like you're in any better shape. You're sore, you're tired, you're feeling the negative consequences for your run, but there's no positive payoff for it.

Same thing on something like lifting weights. You go lift weights for a week, but you don't look or feel any difference. You've got to have a sense of delayed gratification. One of the things this James Clear said in his book Atomic Habits that I thought was really insightful is that the outwe's comes that you experience in your life are a lagging measure of your habits. And so, for example, he says that your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. The messiness of your room is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. That what happens is

you end up getting in life, whatever it is you repeat. But oftentimes the outcomes don't show up in your life for a while. You practice the habit, and then all of a sudden you're confronted with the results, whether you intended that or not. So instead of focusing on results, again, we think the key is to focus on trajectory. If you're living in L.A. and you take a plane and you're trying to fly to New York City, and the pilot of that plane, he changes the trajectory of the plane by just 3.5 degrees, that plane doesn't end up landing in New York. It actually ends up landing in Washington, D.C. It's a tiny little change at the beginning, but it has a huge impact in the end. So rather than focusing on where you're trying to get to go, the point is focus on your trajectory,

focus on the direction that you're heading, because like you just said, you get what you repeat. Small little things over time can land you in the right place or they can land you in the wrong place. So just to be blunt, I'm interested in habits for all kinds of reasons in my life, whether it comes to reading or whether it comes to work habits in the office, eating habits, health habits. But does God care about the kind of habits that we have in our life? Is this topic about habits? Is it related to the kind of person that God wants us to be?

And I think that the answer to that is yes. Hebrew 6.11 to 12 says this. We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end so that what you hope for may be fully realized. We don't want you to become lazy, but to imitate, those who, through faith and patience, inherit what has been promised. I think that the author of Hebrews is saying that our spiritual lives actually require discipline. They actually require work. They actually require us to acquire habits in our lives. And God, he designed us to be people who work, to be people who create. And that means that, again, those tiny little things that we're working on, the tiny

little things that we're doing, they're going to have big impacts in the long term of our life. And it's definitely true that God has called us to honor him in our vocation, to work hard in the responsibilities and in the roles that he's given us. And so these habits that we develop will affect our work life. And since that's a big part of how we honor and serve God and love our fellow people, then the habits we have in our workplace are really spiritual in nature. They affect our relationship with God and how we reflect God's image. the people around us. So we just recently posted an interview between Keith and one of his friends, Patrick Cox, who works at a local company here in Columbia, about how to share your faith at work. And one of the things that Patrick says in that interview that I thought was really good is that

no one's going to believe what you have to say about God if you don't do your work with excellence. If you aren't doing your work in a way that makes them say, wow, I mean, this is someone who's committed, whose work shows a degree of excellence that I want to emulate, and I want to see what's empowering that in their lives. And so having healthy habits isn't just about ourselves. It's actually part of the way that we honor God and share him with other people around us. We can link to that interview between Patrick and I in our show notes. If you want to learn more about that topic, I'd encourage you to check it out. He's got a lot of wisdom to share on that. So let's talk now about how we can actually develop some of these habits in our lives. And again, like we mentioned, we're pulling these from a lot of different

books. This isn't just Keith and Patrick wisdom. We're taking a lot of stories and illustrations out of those books. So I guess you can turn this off and go listen to them. But let's start here. What are habits? I think of habits as being an instinct. It's that gut level thing that we tend to do. So there was a psychology experiment, and what they did was they put cats inside of dark boxes. And obviously, the cats are trying to get out. They're scratching at the edges. They're snarling. They're doing anything they can to get out of the box. But here's the catch. There's a lever inside of it that opens a door. And so eventually the cats find the lever. They knock it over, and they are able to, to get out. Now here's what's interesting. After 20 to 30 attempts, the cats, they figure it out.

They're able to get out of the box, usually in an average of six seconds. In other words, by repetition, they develop a habit. They are able to instinctually knock the lever over and get out of the box. I think of habits as something you do without ever even thinking about it. And that's a really good thing in our life, that we can develop habits that we don't have to pay a lot of attention to because that allows us to use our mind. mind space, our brain space, to think about more important things. But if you notice you have a morning routine, a way that you maybe get a shower, brush your teeth, get dressed. You have a regular thing you do without ever paying attention to it. You do the same thing every single day.

And habits, like I said, are good because they allow you to focus your attention on other more important things. But all habits, they start with a cue, something that triggers you to head down a certain path. And one of the things that we have to do if we want to develop good habits is to make those cues more obvious. So, for example, Christine and I try to have a big veggie bowl or a big fruit bowl in the refrigerator. Because if I open up the refrigerator and see that, I'm likely to eat veggies or fruit. If I open it up and don't see it, then I am likely to reach for the butter and sugar. So you're talking about environmental cues, right? The things that we see that are around us are often the things that cue us to do something habitually. So if we can

change our environment, we can actually do a lot towards changing our habits. So this is a crazy story. But in Vietnam, a lot of the soldiers had used heroin, even a decent percentage of them, were addicted to heroin. And so the war department and the United States government was trying to prepare for what was it going to be like as the war ended and as the soldiers came home to have a re-entry into society of all these people who were addicted to heroin. But what they found was that all those people who were addicted to heroin in Vietnam, when they came back to the United States, the addiction was gone. Or if it wasn't quite what we'd call a clinical addiction, they just stopped using heroin as soon as they came back here. And that is because their environment was

completely different. And all the cues that had set them off on using heroin while they were in Vietnam were no longer present. Or imagine somebody who goes to rehab for, say, alcohol abuse and they get away from their current environment and they find a lot of sobriety in the rehab center. But then they come back to the same environment they'd been in before and they have a lapse. In other words, they pick up drinking right where they left off. Why did they have success when they're gone? Well, the environment was different. At least that's part of their answer. And therefore, when they came back and entered into the same environment and were around the same cues, they responded habitually in the way they always had before rehab. So you can just think about your own environment.

What are the negative cues that you want to remove? Maybe if you feel like you're addicted to your phone, one cue is just seeing it. So try to put it somewhere where you can't see it. Don't charge it in your room at night. When you get home, put it into a room that you don't spend much time in. Or maybe you're trying to get rid of a food habit. We'll hide the soda. Don't just leave it in plain view. Maybe you're trying to do something positive. Like you're saying, hey, I want to read my Bible more. Well, if the first thing you do when you wake up is after you brush your teeth and all that, go and get a cup of coffee, the best thing you could do is set your Bible next to it every single night. Set your Bible right next to the coffee maker so that when you pour your coffee,

you have a cue. Okay, now it's time to sit down and read my Bible. Okay, so now you're talking about habit stacking, taking habits that we've already created in our life and coupling them with another habit that we want to establish. So just to be clear, Patrick said, you may already have the habit of getting up and drinking coffee every morning. So that's something you do without thinking. That's your normal routine. So what you do is that you put your Bible next to the coffee maker so that when you drink your coffee, you start to read your Bible, the habit that you want to develop. One thing I started doing was whenever I get in my car in the morning and other times throughout the day, is that I make that the time I pray. So when I'm in the car, I pray. Well, I'm going to get in the car and

drive around. That's part of my normal routine. I want to pray more. So what I've tried to do is couple the new habit I want to develop praying with the habit that is already there getting in the car and driving to the gym. Another really good way to change your cues, the things that are triggering you, is to actually sit down and write out your specific intentions. This is something that I'm guessing most people listening to this won't actually do, but I've done it myself. And I've found it to be incredibly powerful. There was a study that was done, and there were two different groups of people. One group was asked, will you vote? And of course, most people say, yes, I'm going to vote. The other group was asked, what time will you vote? And they wrote down a time that they were

going to go to the voting booth. What was interesting was that the people who were just asked the general question were far less likely to actually show up and vote than the group of people who came up with a specific plan. This is one reason we create these little guided Bible reading plans here on the first day of every single plan, no matter what, one of the things that we ask you to do is write down a plan for when you are going to read your Bible and to be really specific with it. And what we've seen again, again, is the people who actually do it, even though it seems weird, they are the ones who tend to follow through and actually build a habit. And planning like Patrick is talking about is more powerful than even motivation.

Sometimes we think, well, I would start a better habit if I was motivated to do so. What I need is more motivation. But here's another study. They had one group of people who they just said, hey, work out whenever you want to. Another group of people, they said, here are a lot of really good reasons why you will benefit from working out. In other words, they gave them like a big motivational speech, motivational material. The third group, they said, when are you going to work out? And what are you going to do when you work out? And so they had a plan. And the people who really worked out more were the people with a plan, not the people with more motivation. In fact, the people who only had motivation didn't really work out any more than the control group, the people

with no motivation or plan at all. Try doing this on a piece of paper just write down. When I wake up, I will brush my teeth. I'll set my phone in a different room. I'm going to grab my coffee and read my Bible. And just see if it has a change in your discipline of reading the Bible. You're going to drink your coffee after you brush your tea? I am a post-brushing coffee drinker. I don't get that close to people. They don't have to worry about my breath. It's not just a cue that starts you down a habit, but it's also the reward that you get from doing the habit. You need a payoff. You won't keep doing something over and over and over unless there's some sort of, well, payoff. And oftentimes those payoffs are too far in the distance. Like we said earlier, you could go for a run, but you're not

going to be in great shape. You could eat organic kale for a meal, but that's not going to make any difference. So you have to, at least not for a really long time. So what you have to do is you have to create short-term rewards. They have to be somehow manufactured so that you have something to celebrate, something that makes you feel like you accomplished something worth doing. A great way to create rewards for yourself is to ask this question. What's something that I really enjoy doing? And then what's something that I know is a good thing, but I don't really enjoy. And the key is to put them together. This is called temptation bundling. Okay. So here's an example. There was an engineering student in Ireland who loved watching Netflix. Go figure. That's

lots of people. And he hated working out. So he hacked his exercise bike so that Netflix would play on its screen, but there was a catch. He had to be running the bike at a particular speed. If he dropped lower than the speed, the Netflix stopped. And he told himself, the only time that I will watch Netflix is when I'm on the bike. In doing this, taking a habit, it that he enjoyed watching Netflix and one that he didn't exercising on a bike, he was able to put them together and create a reward for doing the thing that he enjoyed. So most of us can't hack an exercise bike. What does this mean for us? One example. Let's say you're in sales and let's say you also like watching TV. Well, just make yourself a rule. I won't watch a TV show until I've made

10 sales calls today. Figure out what the thing is that you like and the thing is that you don't want to do and make the thing that you like the reward for doing the thing you don't want to do. The reality is that we default to doing whatever is easiest. And that's something I don't like about myself. Maybe you don't like it about yourself either, but it is the way that we are wired. And so what we have to do is not so much depend on our willpower to kind of gut through doing the right thing as much as we need to try to make the right thing as easy as possible for us to do. We have to set up our environment, set up our schedule so that we default to the good thing, the right thing, the kind of person that we want to be. So imagine that you want to be a kind of person who writes thank you notes,

or you want to be the kind of person that sends cards to people on special days in their life. Well, you should set those thank you notes or those greeting cards out where you will see them, maybe even stamp them so that you take all the work out of it. If what you have to do when you think of sending someone a card is go to the store and pick out the right card and then go find a stamp. And it's just not going to happen, at least not very often. But if you have the card sitting right there on your table, right there on your desk, you might very well do it. And you can do this with killing a bad habit too.

If you're the kind of person that scrolls through social media more than you want to, then put a very long password into your social media account and don't let your phone. and store it, that password. So that every time you go to your phone to get into social media, you have to put in this long cumbersome password, it just makes it a little bit more difficult. Or if you like to watch TV, but you don't want to watch as much as you're doing right now, what if you unplugged your television? Or if you took your batteries out of your remote control, or if you put your television in a different room in a closet and had to go get it out and plug it in in order to watch it. You see where this is going. We're trying to make things we want

to stop doing as hard as possible and things that we want to start doing as easy as possible. If your phone is next to your bed, you are going to reach for it first thing in the morning. You've got to put it outside of your room if you help to have any success. If you put your Bible right next to your bed, you increase the likelihood that you will reach for it and read it in the morning, not because you have great willpower, but because you've made it easy. Another great way to make things easy is using small intervals. A lot of times when there's something that we don't want to do and we think it's going to take a lot of time, we just stop because, again, it sounds too hard. So a good way to create small intervals, we'll take

Bible reading again. You know, I'll talk to people and say, oh yeah, I want to read a chapter of the Bible every day. Well, for some of us, especially if we haven't been reading the Bible, that might actually be a lot. So rather than saying I'm going to read a chapter of the Bible, What if you just said, I'm going to read one subheading or even one paragraph out of the Bible a day? And here's the thing. Once you start reading, once you get through the subheading or the paragraph, what you might end up discovering is that you keep going. You continue working through it. And you can do the same thing with lots of other habits. You say, hey, I'm just going to do this thing for two days. So when I have to write a Bible study or something and I don't want to do it, I'll often just set out of time for five minutes.

I'll say, okay, I'm just going to go for five minutes. And if I don't want to keep going after five minutes, I'll move on. But what I've discovered is most of the time I'm ready to keep going. There's a guy named BJ Fogg, who is a professor at Stanford, and who has a book out called Tiny Habits, but who I think is also the source of almost all these other books on habits. He's done tons and tons of research on it. And I heard an interview with him on a podcast, and this sounds weird, and I'm skeptical of the whole tiny habit thing that Patrick just shared and that BJ Fogg researches and swears by. But what he wanted to do is he wanted to get in better shape, and he's,

he thought the good way to do that was to do push-ups. And so he did the habit stacking where he said, now brace yourself, every time he went to the bathroom, he would do two push-ups. And so throughout the day, I think he works at home, so it's not like in a weird office place or something because that'd be... I'm going to start doing it in our office. Stop. I'll pay you. We'll put a camera in there and watch people's reaction. Anyway, so every time he goes to the bathroom, he does two push-ups. Now, I think, for What I understand from his story is that sometimes he does a lot more than two, but he tells himself he's just going to do two. It's simple. And oftentimes he just does the two. The point is that

tiny habits develop a trajectory that we're on. And before we know it, there's a long-term payoff so that the trajectory is more important than the results. So back to the topic of rewards. We're just talking about making the habit easy. Another way to, in some ways almost kind of hack your mind is to create some short-term rewards so that, again, like he just said, the reward is often so far down the line that we won't end up doing the habits that get us there. So we can ask ourselves, can I create some short-term rewards along the way that give me a reward in the immediate moment that's going to help me continue going on? So let me give a few examples. This one's kind of a weird one that might not work for most people, but strangely enough,

it worked for me. My job requires a lot of writing. And so what I did was I took two different little buckets, tiny little buckets, and I put 150 paper clips into one bucket and none into the other. And every single time I wrote a page, I would move one paperclip into the next bucket. Now, it sounds stupid to say, wow, what a wonderful reward. You got to move the paper clip over. But it was this very externalized way of saying to myself, you know what? I just accomplished something. You're checking a box off the list. And I, I told myself, once I had moved all of the paper clips over into the other bucket, I was going to get a big reward at the end. I was going to give myself some money to go buy some new clothes.

Now, that didn't work out because my wife said I couldn't have the money to buy my clothes, but I still built the habit of writing more frequently. So we all won in the end. The reality is, though, that most of us are more motivated by losing something than we are excited about gaining something. So just to make it clear here is that the thought of losing $5 is more of a bummer to us than the idea of gaining $5. And so what usually works better than saying, hey, I get a new outfit or I get to buy something I'm interested in if I do this habit is to say if I don't do it,

then what I'm going to have to do is pay money. I lose something. So they do this study. I know we're full of studies today, but I think they're really interesting. They're trying to get people to stop smoking, and they have three groups. The first group is the control group, and they just give them information and Nicorette patches, things like that, right?

The second group, they say if you quit smoking, we will give you $800. All right, so that's pretty motivating, right? Well, the third group, what they do is they say, you have to start out by giving us $150. If you quit smoking, you'll get the $150 back plus $500. If you don't quit smoking, you lose the $150. So either way you look at it, no matter what they do, even if they quit smoking, the most they get out of it is $500. If you add the $150 to it, it's still $650. It's less than the $800.

You would think if it's just about money, if it's just about gaining, that the people who are offered $800 would be the most motivated to quit smoking. But that's not what happened. The people who are most motivated is the people who had the thought that they would lose $150 if they didn't do it. So a great thing to do is to create costs for breaking healthy habits. This sounds crazy, and I hope someone on this podcast does it. But what one guy did, one of the authors that we've read, is he took a $100 bill and he taped it next to his calendar. And on his calendar, he wrote down every single day that he was going to work out. And he told himself, if I don't work out on a day that I said I was going to work out, I'm going to take that $100 bill off the wall, grab a lighter, which is right below it, and I'm going to light it on fire. And because he did not want to lose $100 like any same person, that was motivating enough for him when he didn't want to go to the gym to say, okay, I'm going today. So for you, I'm not saying put $100 bill on the wall to read your Bible every day, although who knows, maybe if that's what gets you going, that's fine. What's something that you can cost yourself? Maybe you have to pay a friend some money if you don't build the habit.

Maybe you have to give money to a political candidate that you don't like if you don't build the habit. That's amazing. I never thought of that. Think of something that you don't want to lose and figure out a way to give it away. Maybe it's you have to give your phone to someone or turn off all of its functionalities. Figure out something that you don't want to lose and say, if I don't do the habit, I'm going to pay the cost. If you don't do the habit, you've got to make a donation to the KU Scholarship Fund. That's great.

So to summarize what we've been talking about, about how to develop habits, there's lots of things you can do. And chances are you're not going to do all of these. So here's what I would say. pick one or two of the things that we talked about and try to use it to develop some habits. I think developing healthy spiritual habits would be an enormous step, you know, reading your Bible, praying more frequently, developing a healthy lifestyle. That would be an enormous step forward. God cares about your body. But what we've talked about is you're talking about creating new cues. So that looks like sometimes changing your environment or sometimes it means writing out a specific plan.

We talked about creating rewards, whether that's by temptation bundling. So putting something that you really want with something that you don't want to do. We talked about the need to make habits easier. You have to decrease the friction to be able to do it. We talked about habit stacking, adding in habits to existing habits. And then we talked about creating short-term rewards so that along the way we've got tiny little things that help us keep moving forward. And lastly, we talked about loss aversion. Make not following through with that habit. Make it really costly. Make it hurt. Let's go back to the big point here. Show me a person's habits. Show me the systems that they've set up in their life. And I will tell you what kind of person they will be in a year, five years, ten years down the road.

Our life is a product of our habits, the little choices that we make on a daily basis. It's not really that important right now what your results are. What's really important right now is the direction you're headed, your trajectory. Small steps done on a daily basis will have a tremendous impact in your life. They will shape what kind of person you are, what kind of values you have, your character. So don't put it off anymore. Maybe grab one of the books that are in our show notes and read it, learn more, but put it into practice. Small steps make a big difference.

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