Man, it’s time for a Lift update, right?
We’ve been experimenting with different configurations of an app that will put anyone on the path to super-humandom. By experimenting, I mostly mean experimenting on ourselves.
So if you were hoping to read a lot about me and a little bit about the cutting edge of behavior design, you’re in luck.
What is Lift exactly?
I don’t like to go on record with specifics because they change so often. We’ve built a handful of variations, but the core has always been using positive reinforcement to make being awesome easier.
The first version was like Twitter (text area + activity stream) with points. In fact you could give yourself as many points as you wanted, “+1Million I got out of bed today.”
Last week’s version had a lot of checkboxes and no points. That’s basically the opposite of the first version.
The constant is that when Lift is successfully giving out rewards, we all feel super human. Lift takes willpower out of the equation for us.
The One Habit of Highly Successful People
The one habit of highly successful people is that they’re able to create good habits.
There was a great article in the NY Times recently about Decision Fatigue. Decisions are the opposite of habits. A habit is automatic. A decision takes willpower.
You have finite willpower. So an ambitious, disorganized person (like me) makes a lot of mistakes because they run into situations where they know what to do but don’t have the decision making energy to decide to do it.
The first habit I picked up with Lift was flossing. Jon, my cofounder, started with inbox zero. I’m not going to argue that those habits alone are going to make us highly successful people.
What they did do was give us both the confidence that we could create any habit. Now, when we want to level up, we look at what habits will get us there.
“Lift! It’ll turn you vegan!”
We’re going to need a better marketing slogan.
I’m the least likely person to go vegan. Every significant party I’ve ever thrown has revolved around eating meat. I said goodbye to a job by throwing a sausage party for my coworkers and for my 30th birthday I smoked ribs (St. Louis Style) for all of my friends.
All I really want is to lose weight and be healthier. I started by trying out better eating habits.
My first habit was to eat slow carb meals (a la Tim Ferris’ 4-hour Body). I was pretty consistent for my main three meals but I didn’t lose any weight at all. (I’m still surprised by this given how bad I had been eating).
So I looked at my non-meal-time eating and realized that I still ate a ton of candy. So I gave up refined sugar. That still didn’t have an effect. Next, I looked at my sedentary lifestyle and added in a little exercise. Still no effect.
I kept changing my habits until I ended up vegan with a small amount of exercise. That works for me.
It’s not that I now have the magic formula for weight loss (eat better, exercise a little). There are thousands of magic formulas for that.
What I do have is the fundamental skill for weight loss: I can change.
Lift is the secret sauce for that skill. It gives me enough reinforcement to get started on any habit and enough information to adjust as I’m going.
One pushup per day
Our friend, BJ Fogg, who does behavior design research at Stanford gave us an idea that he calls “tiny habits.”
Generating habits are the primary challenge for reaching your goals. You don’t win a marathon by running really hard just the one time. And you don’t earn a promotion with just one powerpoint presentation. There are millions of steps along the way.
The idea of a tiny habit is to strip out everything that might be a barrier to creating a routine, including the difficulty of the routine. Make it as easy as possible. Make it laughably easy. After that, your natural instincts will take over to push yourself harder and smarter.
Tiny habits are minimal routines like “floss at least one tooth” or “put your running clothes on after waking up”. Those are good routines if they eventually grow to “floss daily” or “run in the morning.”
Can I do 100 pushups in one go? I’ve tried the official 100 pushups program several times, but I always break down in week 3. That week is so demoralizingly difficult that I give up.
SoI tried this, “do at least one pushup every day.” Usually I do 20 pushups. If I feel good, I try to go for a personal best. If I feel bad, I just do a couple.
The result isn’t perfect–my personal best isn’t going up as fast as I’d like. But I have a routine that’s lasted 79 days. That’s a habit. And I’m confident that I will, one day, be able to do 100 pushups.
Admittedly, pushups are a novelty goal for a desk jockey like me. But this same basic concept is the core productivity method for a lot of prolific writers.
Stephen King writes ten pages per day (they don’t have to be good pages). Some days his work ends by lunch, some days it ends at 5pm. What’s interesting about his goal, is that it never keeps him at his desk until midnight. He’s prolific, but it’s because of consistent effort, not heroic effort.
What’s next?
As of last Thursday, we do have a pretty strong idea of what we’re building. It’s mobile-friendly. It has a reward system. It has a way for you to see what’s working and to change to something better. It has support for the little details that throw you off track. If you’re interested, the best way to stay informed is to add your email address to the beta, lift.do.
* Image by pasukaru
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Twitter
HackerNews
Tumblr
I am REALLY liking this direction, both the focus on habits and specifically the idea of *tiny* habits. The power in small acts done *daily* is well-known, but rarely practiced when we need it the most.
The best reinforcement we can get is not a *million points, you rock* from our friends, but the rich reward of having actually made progress toward something. As you said, once you realize that you can change X, the idea of changing Y starts to look more promising. I am excited to see where Lift goes.
(As you know, I have been doing experiments with my horses, and my latest just happened to also be nano-habits… I’ll tell you about that one next time we talk :)
@kathy: I think you’ve hinted at a new marketing slogan, “Proven on horses.”
The big challenge with tiny habits is not getting them to work, but getting people to believe that they work. Are they macho enough? We’re fighting a lot of years of culture there.
Oooooo, I am more intrigued than ever.
I’ve been really fascinated for a long time with human behavior…mostly around the idea of culture and at what point a cluster or group of habits actually become culture.
To me, it’s like lift is fostering an internal culture, where we sequentially develop a habit based on the last one…until we’ve undergone some type of transformation and establish a new culture of self.
Oh, I totally dig what @kathy is saying…from one horse girl to another :)
@midori: Thanks! I like that culture observation a lot. We see that already, even with a small group. Suddenly a bunch of us are flossing, eating more vegetables, and running. And it feels like we were inspired by each other, not guilted.
I just want to know if the Lego guy is supposed to be you Tony. If so, that flossing is really helping with the whiteness of your teeth and what tiny habits got you the Elvis hair?
Seriously that ambitious, yet disorganized description really hits home with me. Can’t wait to see what you guys have got inside that elevator.
[...] I’d like to do, I’ll just focus on one per month, and they will be more habit-oriented. Habit formation takes time; if you consistently do something that you usually don’t do, it becomes a habit in a few [...]
Tony
I’m all for tiny habit changes…except becoming vegan and doing pushups! ;)
This sounds very cool and a great tool for the quantified self movement! Good for you. Just keep us posted please.