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Comment by westcort | Hacker News Reader

I read this book and I think this sums it up in a Tweet:

The laws are: Make it obvious, Make it attractive, Make it easy, Make it satisfying; Each law maps to one of the four steps of habit formation: Make it obvious → Cue Make it attractive → Craving Make it easy → Response Make it satisfying → Reward; Make it Obvious To effectively build a new habit, make the cue for that habit blatantly obvious

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For example? Leave fresh fruit on the table to encourage (cue) eating an apple a day?

No, to watch an apple rot on your counter over 2 weeks to remind yourself of your mortality and motivate yourself.

Sort of like a 'Vanitas' painting but much cheaper.

That's the danger of doing something like this. Plenty of people leave things out to remind themselves to do it, but it quickly becomes part of the background noise. I've had loose wires hanging from the ceiling for nearly a year to remind myself to install lights at some point.

Both of these could work. For example, after reading the book, I stopped showering unless I worked out for 30 minutes on my Concept 2 rowing machine and I have been very consistent about rowing since linking those habits. The rowing machine is also more convenient than running because it is not dependent on weather, so that follows another principle--make it easy to do the right thing.

Memento malum.

Yup. In general - handle the dependencies after you've done The Thing instead of before doing it the next time.

It's easy to do Y and Z after you already got up and did X. It's much harder to persuade yourself to do Y so that you can do Z so that you can do X when you're lying in bed fighting to get out 15 minutes earlier.

Leaving the fruit on the table also makes it easy to eat it.

Make it easier to do the good habits, and harder to the bad ones.

I'd recommend looking into the research that Prof. Wendy Wood at USC Marshall has been doing on habit forming behaviour in humans.

In the book he takes almost this example. Once a week (after doing grocery shopping for example) prepare some fruits: peel and cut them if applicable and place them in containers in your fridge. Then, when times comes to have a snack it's really easy to eat fruit vs. something else. That would be the "make it easy" rule. You could combine it with the inverse of that same rule rule for junk food: "make it hard" and don't buy junk food during grocery shopping.

Set fresh fruit as your desktop wallpaper?

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