Make It Obvious And You Will Make It Successful
The following is my Purposeful Strength newsletter from January 26h 2021. For those of you who are on the newsletter (thank you!), you’ve read this before, but maybe need to re-see some of the concepts. For those of you who have no clue what any of that mean, this is the newsletter that I send out every Tuesday morning at 11am. If you want to join the party, there’s a submission box at the bottom of this page.
Enjoy!
Tuesday January 26th- 11am
So Obvious It Hurts
Have you ever thought about the most impactful moments of your life?
Maybe it was a life event, like the birth of a child.
Maybe a near death experience that you survived, like a car accident.
Maybe it was a piece of advice or an experience you encountered that really put areas of your life into perspective.
Maybe, just maybe, you read a fucking awesome book.
That last one. That one was mine. I read a book.
Before you judge, a little context.
I hate reading. I had a high school english teacher absolutely ruin ‘fun’ reading for me by what I will go to my grave thinking was over complicating the analytics of reading. Neither here nor there, BUT, I hate reading and now you know why.
For me to read a book, it has to be referred to me by close to a dozen people. I have to see it in blogs, I have to have people that I respect tell me it’s worth while, it needs to be available in audio form, basically, the stars need to align all the way out to Pluto for me to muster up the desire to read the damn book.
In April 2020, there must have been a full moon, a solar eclipse, and Haileys Comet all in the same time frame because I read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
And it changed my life.
Now, if you haven’t read it, you should consider it, but this isn’t a book review, it’s a newsletter that is supposed to share a very specific message. So back to business.
The author does a great job highlighting 4 pillars to successful habit creation. What those habits are will always be unique to you, BUT, if you can follow these 4 pillars, you might just get that sucker to stick.
Make it obvious.
Make it attractive.
Make it easy.
Make it satisfying.
Seems simple, but I promise, it’s not easy.
Throughout the past 9 months I’ve changed about a half dozen serious habits in my life, and have helped friends, family, and clients alike do the same. Not because of the 4 pillars working together. But because of the first pillar.
Make it obvious.
To us as individuals when we want to drive change in our life, the change is something we typically want with high desire.
I want to lose weight.
I want to eat better.
I want to sleep 9 hours every night.
I want to read more books.
You get the idea. We want a lot and we want it bad. Because of this, anything we do to initiate action seems like it will be obvious.
If I want to lose weight, I’m going to prepackage my meals for the work week so that I can stay consistent in my calorie intake.
Bravo, a great habit indeed. Personal Trainer Casey is pumped for you!
But is it obvious enough? I’d say no and here’s why. The prepped food is the result of action. It’s obvious, but only once the food is cooked and packaged and sitting in your fridge.
We need to make our meal prep habit MORE obvious. So obvious it hurts. SO obvious that even if you were sleepwalking in the middle of the night you would still be able to do it.
What does that look like? Let's rehatch the example above.
f my goal is to lose weight and I want to prep my food in advance, leave all the cooking gear out and in the way of your kitchen.
Leave the pots and pans on top of the oven.
Leave the food scale sitting on the counter.
Leave everything you may need in the way. Make it so obvious that all your kitchen gear is just begging you to use it. These constant reminders also set off the chain reaction of the other three pillars.
Make it so obvious that it becomes attractive.
Make it so obvious that it becomes easy.
Make it so obvious that it becomes satisfying.
Now you’ve made it so you can achieve it. That achievement will yield results. Those results will spark more action. That action is going to produce motivation.
You got this.
Have a great week everyone,
-Casey