The Good Life Blueprint Series: Volume 1-3

The Habit Blueprint

15 Simple Steps to Transform Your Life

by Patrik Edblad

What Others Are Saying About The Habit Blueprint

Many people want to improve their habits, but don’t know how to get started. Fortunately, Patrik Edblad provides a simple step-by-step solution for starting (and sticking) to a new routine. It’s the perfect resource for anyone who struggles to create lasting change in their lives. — Steve Scott, bestselling author of Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less

Patrik Edblad shows you how to create unbreakable habits without breaking a sweat. When you learn these skills, you’ll have the secret sauce to finally follow through on your goals without giving up or getting frustrated. A must-read if you’re serious about sustaining habits. — Barrie Davenport, bestselling author of Sticky Habits: How to Achieve Your Goals without Quitting and Create Unbreakable Habits Starting with Five Minutes a Day

I’ve personally witnessed Patrik lead hundreds of people to complete and total life transformations. This powerful book captures every one of Patrik’s habit systems and tricks. With this book in your hand, you will create as many new habits as you can imagine. — Tony Stubblebine, founder of award-winning habit tracking app Coach.me

Your Free Gifts

As a way of saying thank you for your purchase, I’d like to offer you two complimentary gifts:

The Habit Blueprint Workbook. We’ll be covering a lot of powerful strategies in this book. To make it as easy as possible for you to implement them into your life, I’ve created a step-by-step checklist you can use every time you get started with a new habit. This resource takes you through all the steps outlined in this book one by one, so you can make sure you put all the strategies to work for you as efficiently as possible.

>>> Tap Here to Grab The Habit Blueprint Workbook<<<

The Science of Willpower: Proven Strategies to Beat Procrastination & Get Big Things Done. This e-book will show you:

Why self-control is so important;

How willpower works like a muscle;

Why you should manage your energy, not your time;

The physiology of self-control;

Five cornerstone habits of willpower;

Five powerful tactics to increase your willpower;

And much more.

>>> Tap Here to Grab The Science of Willpower: Proven Strategies to Beat Procrastination & Get Big Things Done <<<

Contents

Introduction

How to Use This Book

The Habit Loop

Step 1: Pick Your Habit

Step 2: Start Ridiculously Small

Step 3: Build a Chain

Step 4: Choose a Trigger

Step 5: Create a Reward

Step 6: Set Up a Token Economy

Step 7: Schedule a Weekly Review

Step 8: Design Your Environment

Step 9: Make Procrastination Difficult

Step 10: Surround Yourself with Role Models

Step 11: Turn Accomplices into Supporters

Step 12: Create a Commitment Contract

Step 13: Get Accountability

Step 14: Prevent Mental Loopholes

Step 15: Plan for Failure

Grab Your Free Workbook

Sources

Introduction

According to research from Duke University¹, somewhere around 40 percent of the actions people perform every day aren’t due to decision making but habits.

Take a moment to reflect on what that means. Almost half of the things you do on a given day aren’t the result of conscious decisions but behaviors that you have repeated so many times they have become more or less automatic. You no longer think about them, you just do them.

Imagine what it would mean to you if you could find a way to change this 40 percent of actions so that you got them to work for you in every area of your life. What would it mean for your health? Your finances? Your relationships? Your personal growth?

This is why I absolutely love the topic of habits. It’s also why I think understanding the mechanics of human behavior is a crucial skill in life. Because when we understand human behavior, it enables us to create our habits, which then create us. Almost every area of life reflects our daily habits:

How in shape you are is a result of your habits.

How productive you are is a result of your habits.

How educated you are is a result of your habits.

How much money you have is a result of your habits.

How good your relationships are is a result of your habits.

How happy you are is a result of your habits.

When we don’t have a proper understanding of how habits work, we try to force our way to change by sheer will and usually end up at square one within a matter of months (or days). What’s worse, each time we fail, we lose a little bit more confidence and get more and more discouraged until learned helplessness sets in.

If you’re at the point where new-year resolutions have become something you keep just for the sake of keeping resolutions, rather than actually going after them, you know exactly what I mean. And you’re not alone. About 92 percent of people fail at their resolutions every year².

But that also means 8 percent actually follow through on their goals. And contrary to what you might expect, these people are no different from you. They don’t possess superhuman levels of self-control and some innate drive that makes them unbeatable.

What separates the habitual achievers from the rest is simply a system they’ve found to work for them that they use over and over again to create the change they want in all areas of life.

The only thing that stands between you and your most desired goals is really nothing more than a systematic, proven strategy you can use to make them a reality.

This book contains that strategy.

In the next couple of chapters, you’ll be guided through a series of scientifically proven techniques for creating habits. Everything will be laid out with very simple, step-by-step explanations and actions based on the latest and best research regarding behavior change.

Sound good? Let’s do this thing!

How to Use This Book

There are two ways you can read this book: passively or actively. Passively means you consume the material, getting a bit of entertainment and learn some new stuff. Reading actively, on the other hand, means you engage with the material, think about how the strategies outlined relate to you, and most importantly, take action on what you learn.

This book contains all the strategies you need to establish new habits and create massive change in your life. But that will only happen if you actually put the tactics to use.

So don’t confuse motion with action. Don’t settle for just reading passively, nodding along as you go, thinking, yeah, I should probably do that. Ideas are worthless without execution. So make a commitment right now to experiment with what you’re learning. Doing this will not be as comfortable as just reading, but it will make all the difference in how much value you get out of this book.

Since you’re the biggest expert in the world on your behavior (and since you likely don’t have access to a team of researchers who could do it for you), I encourage you to take on the roles of both scientist and subject from this point forward.

Let life become your experiment and the world your lab.

If you can successfully adopt this scientist and subject mindset³, you’ll dramatically increase your chances of creating whatever change you want in your life. Why? Because now, you cannot fail.

Where most people see setbacks as proof of their incompetence and as a sign that they should quit, you’ll see valuable data and feedback you can use for your next attempt. Instead of seeing your change as something you have to do, you’ll view it as something you want to do. Instead of getting discouraged, you’ll get curious. Instead of quitting, you’ll persistently refine your approach until you’ve found a way that works for you.

Sounds good? Are you ready to experiment? Awesome!

I recommend you start by reading through the entire book first. Doing this will give you a good idea of all the strategies and allow your brain to start working on how you could most effectively put them to use. Then download The Habit Blueprint Workbook, pick a habit you’d like to create, and get to work!

Let’s get to it!

The Habit Loop

We’ll begin by examining how habits work. One very helpful framework for doing this comes from researchers at MIT⁴. They have discovered that all our habits are driven by the same simple neurological loop. This habit loop consists of three components:

A cue, which is the trigger that starts your habit

A routine, which is the habit itself

A reward, which is the benefit you gain from doing the habit

If you perceive the reward as positive, you’ll want to repeat the loop again the next time the same cue shows up. When this sequence gets repeated enough times, it will become automatic and a habit will be formed.

Phone application developers are very aware of this and design their apps in a way that plays right into our psychology to get us hooked on their product.

If you tend to respond immediately to notifications on your phone, you know what I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter much what you’ve got going on at that moment; the urge you get from the notification is enough to make you abort what you’re doing and check your phone instead.

Here’s how the habit loop works in this scenario: your phone gives off a notification sound (cue), you pick up your phone and check the notification (routine), and get to know what the notification is about (reward).

Knowing that all your habits work this way is very powerful, because it allows you to experiment deliberately with different cues, routines, and rewards until you get them to work for you.

In the next couple of pages, you’ll get to learn the best strategies scientists have found for doing just that.

Step 1: Pick Your Habit

You probably have an idea of the change you want to create in your life. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this book. But before definitely deciding what habit to start working on first, I want to share an idea that will greatly enhance the chances for you to get some really explosive results from this book.

Have you ever noticed how some habits tend to spill over and create positive effects across all areas of your life? In his book, The Power of Habit, author and habit expert Charles Duhigg refers to these behaviors as keystone habits.⁵

For me, exercise is a huge keystone habit. I know this because whenever I work out regularly, all the other aspects of my life seem to fall naturally into place by themselves: I sleep better, I eat better, I’m way more productive, and I enjoy life more in general.

So, to get a flying start on your habit change, I highly recommend you begin with a keystone habit. Ask yourself what habit seemed to have had this positive ripple effect in your life in the past. It could be exercise, but it could also be practicing meditation, getting proper sleep, decluttering your environment, adjusting your eating and drinking habits, or something else entirely.

If you can think of several keystone habits, that’s great, but I encourage you to start working on just one of them the first time you read this book. There’s nothing wrong with going after several habits at once, but going through the process with just one habit is very helpful because it keeps things simple and reduces the risk of your becoming overwhelmed.

When you’ve successfully established one habit, you can then start experimenting with adding several others.

Step 1: Pick Your Habit

Reflect on your keystone habits. What behaviors have spilled over and created a ripple effect of positive change in all areas of your life in the past?

Pick just one habit. This is the habit you will be working on while reading this book for the first time.

Step 2: Start Ridiculously Small

A parole board judge is just about to make a final decision on whether or not to approve a criminal for parole. What do you think will affect this decision the most?

Maybe the crime committed? Or the particular law that was broken? Perhaps the criminal’s recent behavior in prison?

These are all reasonable guesses, but as it turns out, they are not even close. No, the most important factor that will decide the outcome for the criminal is instead something as seemingly trivial as the time of day.

More precisely, the chances of getting a favorable ruling will be about 65 percent in the morning and right after lunch. Should the case come up just before lunch or late in the day, the criminal’s chances will instead be close to zero.

And this isn’t true just for some rare, isolated events. The researchers who noticed this trend found that it held true for more than eleven hundred cases, no matter what the crime was.⁶ How could this be?

Research has shown that willpower works like a muscle. This idea is known as ego-depletion⁷ and explains that just like a physical muscle, your willpower gets increasingly tired the more you put it to use.

You can think of your willpower as a cell phone battery that gets charged when you rest. When you wake up in the morning, your willpower battery will usually be full. As you get out of bed and start your day, your battery level will drop a bit for every decision that you make throughout your day.

And this was what was happening to the parole board judges. As they progressed through their day, making hard decisions about which criminals should get parole and which criminals shouldn’t, their willpower became more and more depleted.

The less willpower energy they happened to have at the moment, the less inclined they were to give a favorable ruling. After all, it makes sense to play it safe and keep everyone locked up if you’re too tired to make a good decision.

What we can learn from this is that willpower isn’t some trait that you either have or don’t have. Rather, it’s something that fluctuates throughout your day.

So, to ensure that you have sufficient willpower for your habit, it’s a good idea to do it at a time when you know that your willpower is high. However, since you can’t know for sure that you’re always well rested and full of energy, an even better approach is to avoid relying on willpower at all. How?

By starting so ridiculously small that when it’s time to do it, it would be silly to say no.⁸ This strategy is very powerful because it ensures that your habit won’t fail because of random fluctuations in your willpower.

Another benefit of starting really small is it gets you over that initial hurdle of just getting started. You’ve probably often experienced firsthand that getting started doing something is the hard part. Once you’re up and running, it doesn’t require much effort at all. For example, getting to the gym can be tough, but once you’re there, the actual workout itself usually isn’t that bad.

Another benefit you’ll notice when using this strategy is that many times, you’ll end up doing a lot more than you had initially planned to. For example, if your habit is to read one page in a book, you’re likely to end up reading several pages or even the entire chapter. This is because starting small also takes advantage of what psychologists call the Zeigarnik effect, which is our natural tendency to want to finish what we’ve started and not yet completed.⁹

Step 2: Start Ridiculously Small

Make your habit so tiny that you can easily complete it every day without having to rely on willpower. When I say small, I mean really small. Floss one tooth, do one minute of meditation, take a two-minute walk—you get the idea.

Then, if you feel like doing more once you’ve completed your small habit on a given day, by all means go ahead and do it. This is the beauty of the Zeigarnik effect.

But whatever you do, do not increase the difficulty of your habit when you’re just getting started. No matter what you want this habit to look like down the line, focus on establishing the actual behavior first. If you just stick to the process, your small habit will naturally expand into the bigger behavior with time.

Step 3: Build a Chain

When a young comic asked Jerry Seinfeld for advice on how to be a better comic, Seinfeld answered that the way to be a better comic is to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes is to write every day. The young comic recounts Seinfeld’s explanation of his system:

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.¹⁰

This simple strategy is quite brilliant because it plays right into a very interesting aspect of human psychology known in behavioral economics as the sunk cost fallacy. This fallacy can be defined as the tendency to make decisions about the current situation based on what was previously invested in it.¹¹

Here are a few examples to illustrate how this fallacy makes for irrational decisions:

I’m full, but I might as well keep eating because I’ve paid for the food.

This movie is terrible, but I might as well watch the whole thing because I’ve watched an hour of it already.

The class is useless, but since I’ve already paid for it I might as well keep going.

I’m going to stay in this bad relationship because I’ve already invested so much in the other person.

Clearly, the sunk cost fallacy can be a big problem, but we can also get it to work in our favor. And this is precisely where Seinfeld’s strategy shines. Every time you put that big red X on your calendar, you’ve invested yet another day into your chain. The longer your chain gets, the harder it will be for you to skip a day as you don’t want to lose your investment.

Step 3: Build a Chain

Create a chain-building system. There are two ways you can do this:

Get a physical wall calendar. Hang it on a wall where you will see it often and put a pen right next to it so you can easily track your progress every day.

Download a habit tracker. If you prefer working digitally, you can download an app that measures your progress. There are plenty of habit-tracking apps out there, but my favorite is Coach.me.

Once you’ve done this, it’s important that each time you complete your habit, you immediately add a new X to your chain. If you stick to this, it likely won’t be long before you find yourself pushing through even on uninspired days, just to keep your chain going.

Step 4: Choose a Trigger

Now we get to the first part of the habit loop, which is the trigger that will remind you