Ari Yeganeh | mastery.fm

The Power of Reading

It’s insane to think that a person has poured years of their experience and imagination into a book and through the magical invention of words this person can beam their creation straight into our heads. Yet most people don’t read.

Imagine being inside Bill Gates’ head for a couple of hours. Do you think you might learn something new? Or what about a day in the life of Pelé, one of the greatest football players that ever lived. This is the power of reading. It is the closest thing we have to telepathy; yet the average person reads just 4 books a year, the average CEO 50 a year.

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The Power of Compound

Ari Yeganeh:

And this is exactly why 80% of gym memberships are canceled within the first few months. People sign up excited about losing weight normally at the start of the year but after a few weeks they give up because they don’t see any results. Just like the magic wand, they don’t see the invisible 0.1% improvements to their health from each visit to the gym.

But in reality it is exactly these 0.1% baby steps over time that make all the difference. If you kept going just a bit longer, a year of 0.1% improvements everyday will result in a 44% total betterment of any field of your choosing. Two years, 107% improvement. And in 5 years, a massive 520% improvement.

This is the compound power of habits. Tiny actions over time can lead to massive results. This lesson alone made all the difference for me.

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Reminder • Routine • Reward

Ari Yeganeh:

For about a year I struggled to make my exercise habits stick. I found it a chore to wake up early and was tired after work so I never got around to it. I always had an excuse for not working out: “I’m tired today”, “I have too many things on”, “It’s Friday, give me a break”

That was until I came across a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The book made it perfectly clear to me why I couldn’t stick to my exercise habit. This is how it broke down the components of any habit:

Reminder (cue) – the trigger that initiates the behavior

Routine – the behavior itself; the action you take

Reward – the benefit you gain from doing the behavior

All I had so far was the exercise routine, not the reminder or reward.

I started with setting a reminder. I found phone reminders naggy and annoying. That didn’t work. Instead I looked at my day and wrote down actions I took without fail that I could use as reminders: waking up, brushing teeth, eating, getting dressed and so on…

The reminder that was the most powerful for me was hunger. I found if I got really hungry I would be motivated to work out (or do anything) just so I can eat. I liked food too much. More than the pain of an intense workout.

And thanks to this new discovery my new habit started to stick. I started consistently exercising every other day. I had all the components of a habit: reminder (hunger), routine (workout) and reward (food).

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