The book that changed everything I thought I knew about habits
And how I use it to learn language.
And once you understand that habits can change, you have the freedom and the responsibility to remake them. -Charles Duhigg
The alarm was blaring.
“Nope,” I thought, hitting the snooze button.
What seemed like a second later it was going again.
“Not happening.” Snooze.
This happened two more times before I finally woke out of my stupor and realized that I was going to have to move the speed of light to make it to work on time.
I hopped into my warm shower, agitated. It felt good, but it didn’t last long enough.
Coffee, that’s what I need. I put a pot on, stuffed some kind of carbohydrate into my mouth and hurried to the bus stop.
Got on the bus, scrolled through my Instagram until the need to feel productive was shouting too loudly to ignore. I know, I’ll open my email.
I scrolled through my email, ignoring anything that was important, opening newsletters about travel, fitness, and productivity that seemed to be written by authors with superhuman abilities that I could never possess.
I got to work, already tired, ready to go home. Made it through the day, headed home, exhausted, far too tired to work out or make anything substantial for dinner. Turned on Netflix.
This type of day was far more common than I’d like to admit. I was zombieing my way through life.
I knew I needed to change, so I started studying habit.
Most resources you find on habits have one thing in common, they focus on small, incremental changes over time.
This approach makes sense and is very effective for most situations. It’s easier to stay consistent when the changes are small.
But small changes do not always lead to the best results…
I was miserable. I didn’t want a 1% change, I wanted a 100% change.
My situation was not the only one where small changes would be ineffective.
What happens when, in order to make significant progress towards a goal, participants need to be fully immersed in the process?
For the past four years I’ve been coaching clients on how to learn a new language. I’ve found that the students who are successful in achieving conversation are those who fully immerse themselves in the process, even if it is for a short period of time (i. e. 14 to 90 days).
This is especially true for students attempting to make the jump from beginner to intermediate.
Small charges, like studying once per day or, more commonly, going to a class once per week are rarely enough to get students to reach conversational fluency in a new language.
But there is another way.
Own the Day, Our your Life by Aubrey Marcus
The premise of this book is very different from other books about improving your habits. Instead of focusing on a specific habit or habits to change, Aubrey encourages the reader to focus on optimizing a single day.
He gives loads of advice on how to improve your energy, focus, diet, sleeping, training, sex, etc.
The tips are great, but the gold nugget of this book comes from the idea that a person can focus on a single day. They can mark it on their calendar, decide which habits they are going to adopt for that day, execute, and own the day.
When I applied this method, I was surprised with the results. Not because the day I decided to optimize was great, I expected that.
What surprised me was how many of these habits turned into long term behavior changes.
One optimized day morphed into several years of better habits.
The act of making a habit plan and the reward of significantly more energy throughout the day made it so I didn’t want to go back to my sub par habits.
How I use this idea to teach language.
One more concept before getting into the specifics: habit stacking.
Habit stacking is the idea that it is easier to create a new habit on the back of an existing habit.
I call these big habits and small habits. The big habit is something like eating breakfast. The small habit is something you do while performing the big habit, like checking social media while eating breakfast.
Learning a new language requires us to change everything about the way we see the world… or at least what we call everything.
It’s not an extremely difficult task, but it is a monstrous task that requires full immersion.
The only way to fully immerse yourself in the language learning process is to change your little habits.
The way I have my students change their little habits is by identifying what those little habits are.
Eight hours a day, every hour on the hour, for three days I have them track:
1. What they did in the last hour (big habits and little habits).
2. The conversations they had during that hour.
After the three days we have an idea of the habits we can stack on and the personalized vocabulary they can study.
Finally we create an optimized language day. Students know exactly what to do and when to do it.
Study time increases from less than an hour per day to well over three hours per day with little to no effort.
What if I’m not learning a language?
There are lots of other situations where immersing yourself and optimizing a day is preferable to gradual long term change. This is my method of choice any time I am trying to advance from beginner to intermediate in a discipline I care about.
I have used this technique in surfing, partner dancing, making a career change, and learning about things like nutrition, attraction and even habit.
These changes may not be long term, but they are enough to get me over the initial hump of the learning process.
I can’t say that my relationship with my alarm clock has changed entirely, but on most days it is much easier for me to get out of bed than it used to be.
Also, now I can focus on fine tuning a set of good habits instead of trying to replace a set of bad habits one at a time.
In the process, I’ve picked up two new languages, learned to dance salsa, and met my wife… I can’t argue with those results.
How do you feel about immersion vs. long term change?
