090: Shocking Ways to Hack Your Habits with Maneesh Sethi

Pete Mockaitis
Maneesh, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Maneesh Sethi
Hey, it’s pleasure to chat.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my gosh. I think we’re going to have so much fun. I think we’re of like mind when it comes to hacks and tricks and optimizing things. So I’d love to hear, with your writing and your blog, Hack the System, and the other stuff you’ve done, what have been some of your most kind of noteworthy or unconventional hacks you’ve seen applied to the workplace?

Maneesh Sethi
To the workplace. So for productivity and health and fitness or stuff?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Maneesh Sethi
I think that some hacks that can be used for productivity involve kind of identifying what really needs to be done, understanding the principle, and then creating powerful ways to focus and get individual tasks done, without letting it run through your entire day.
So I wouldn’t think these would be called hacks as much as just general things that people should do. One of the simplest ones would be choosing the right habits that will 10x your day and for the least amount of effort. And some of those include writing down what you’re going to do the evening before and then making sure you do it the next day.
A second thing would be kind of understanding your environment and how big an effect your environment has upon your actions. There’s the fundamental understanding that you’re a rat in a cage. As a human, you’re a mammal, and a lot of what you do, that you see other people doing, is happening to you at the same time. You know that if you throw somebody in a box for a few days, they’re going to get really angry. But for some reason, we believe that if we sit in our own room for several days without getting exercise or going outside, we won’t, that we have the ability to command it. So a hack of understanding your own personality and knowing who you are is important. Those are really weird ways to start off describing it, but…

Pete Mockaitis
No, that’s cool. And I appreciate that. And I want to just touch base because it’s come up many times with many guests in terms of I asked in the fast faves, “Hey, what’s a favorite habit of yours?” toward the end of the interview, and one of them is often kind of writing down the key things you want to get done. Some people say the night before. Some people say the morning of. You’re an advocate for the night before. What’s your take on that?

Maneesh Sethi
I think that there are specific keystone habits that are worth developing, but I don’t think that we’ve kind of jumped into hacks, and we haven’t talked about really what we’re talking about, which is why are we doing what we’re doing? I’m kind of curious where you’re coming from. You asked me about Hack the System and different hacks in your life. What do you want to become? What do you want to do?

Pete Mockaitis
What do I want? Pete Mockaitis personally, huh?

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so many things. I’m getting married shortly. That’s coming up in December. So I’d like kind of a fantastic marriage and family life. I’d like to be just sort of fit and energetic and generally at peace. I’d like to become a saint, in terms of just a loving and caring person and connected with other folks and God. I’d like to have a rocking podcast and sort of brand that’s truly helpful for professionals and really kind of helping them out, as well as generating sufficient income to support other things. That’s probably the big pieces.

Maneesh Sethi
Sure. Okay. So a lot of these goals you have involve being a better person to others around you, being a happier person, being more productive in your daily life, and being a little healthier in your daily life. Does that seem more or less correct?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s correct. Yeah.

Maneesh Sethi
I think that fundamentally, one thing we forget to ask as individuals are “Why are we doing what we’re doing?” and “What’s the point?” and “What is really the solution we’re looking for?” It’s very easy to say and jump into solutions without thinking the five whys of your problem or what person you want to be. So one thing is I always just take a step back. I just came from traveling abroad, and this always starts reinvigorating my thoughts. And I was reading a book while I was traveling called “The Culture Code.”
And if you’re not familiar with my blog or you haven’t followed me, I traveled for five years with a blog called “Hack the System: Cheat Codes for Life,” where I wrote about how to travel and how to build productivity and health hacks. And recently, that’s changed into my biggest hack of all, which is a wearable device company called Pavlok that helps people change their habits.
And so, as I was reading this book, “The Culture Code,” he talked a lot about how different cultures respect different things differently, and how things that are cemented in your first 10 to 15 years of life become kind of normal and what is expected and what’s the natural order of things as you get older, and that, for example, different personality traits in America are called disorders, whereas other countries, they’re just normal.
For example, the act of being late or starting new stuff but feeling uncomfortable finishing stuff, that’s considered a key indicator of ADHD in America. But in India or Jamaica, not showing up on time, arriving whenever you feel like it is just an expected outset of the culture. There’s no culture of productivity. There’s a culture of being. And to them, it’s just normal.
And so I grew up with a giant impostor syndrome where I thought my internal goal, my internal metrics have been an American cultural base internal metric of productivity. Get stuff done. Be on time. Clean your room. Whatever was told to me. And I was never physically able to get it done on time. I’ve suffered from severe ADHD ever since I was a kid. And while I was never able to get myself to start a project more than a day in advance, I would always get one of the top grades, and I would feel like something was wrong. There’s this cognitive dissonance growing inside me.
And as I got older, especially in the last year or two, I started to realize that we set goals for ourselves that culture gives us. And those goals involve, in America, it’s often “Be fit. Look like this. Do this. Be that.” And we just take it blindly because we can’t see that we’re inside of it, and we never question why we do what we do. So basically, what I’m going with this is that recently, I’ve been getting into the understanding of feeling, in that I can’t find anything wrong with this thesis, which is all that a single individual experiences life as is feelings at a given time. And you know when there’s often two people watching the same situation, and one feels bad about it and one feels good about it?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Maneesh Sethi
Even though they’re watching the same thing, one interprets it as immoral or sad or angry, and one imagines it as “That was really cool.” All that you can get is that feeling. And a lot of us have trained ourselves through habits to make ourselves feel bad. Well, most people don’t think about habits. Most people just do stuff and then say they’re going to do stuff, and they don’t see the side of it.
So what I’m getting at here is that often the biggest core habits that people do is just consistently negative thinking in a particular pattern. And even deeper than that, consistently letting themselves feel in a way that they shouldn’t, and getting used to that feeling. The feeling of bad. So I would say the biggest hack of all is understanding your feelings and understanding that those are the only things that are real. And rather than trying to solve the external world, you could actually solve a lot more by going after that individual feeling. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s compelling and fascinating and intriguing in so many ways. So I would love to hear, then, what are you thinking are some of the most kind of power-packed, insightful means of getting to the bottom of understanding your feelings and connections in association with those and what they mean?

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah. I’m saying that rather than trying to solve a problem from the outset of the problem, we can approach it in a hacking way by going after how do we train a feeling? I think that there’s a couple of ways, and I’m happy to talk about exactly some cool tactics to adjust internal feelings. And okay, let’s go ahead and talk about that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Maneesh Sethi
So one first thing to understand is that the only time people are dissatisfied or unhappy is when: A. things are not so bad that they’re worried about food or shelter, or worried about survival and safety. You never get dissatisfied when you have to climb a mountain because you’re getting attacked.

Pete Mockaitis
You just go. You just do it.

Maneesh Sethi
You just go. So the only time you can feel dissatisfied is when life is pretty good. And the second part that the only time dissatisfaction happens is when your expectation doesn’t match what’s actually happening. You can’t adjust what’s happening, but you can adjust the expectation. People get unhappy in marriages because they expect to be in love for the rest of their lives, and then they don’t, and then the expectation changes. But for my parents who had an arranged marriage, there was no expectation. They knew from Day 1 they were going to be married together, and there was no question because that’s how it was for years. And they’re still married to this day.
So one of the first hacks is to understand that when you start to feel sad, you can adjust expectation. Now, how do you know when you start to feel sad? That is the real question. How do you know when you feel bad? And most people go through their lives living in an automatic bubble and they never think about stuff. But there’s a cool trick. Every feeling is associated with a physical sense. This is kind of weird, and most people have never thought about this or noticed it, but you should start to notice this. Every time you feel a feeling, there’s somewhere in your body you’re experiencing it, too.

Pete Mockaitis
You mean in my belly or my ticker, heart, or my head, neck? Okay.

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’m with you. And there’s a bodily organ or piece that’s connected to this emotion.

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah. Butterflies in my stomach. Every time you feel anything. Here’s what I’m coming at. Some of the most debilitating problems that people suffer from are anxiety, self-negative talk, continuous scarcity mindset, all mental side stuff. You can’t break and become a successful person, so you break it out here. And let’s think about one of the easier ones. Disgust. Imagine that you see something, like smelly feet or something gross or whatever right now. And I’ll say point to somewhere in your body. And if I’m going to ask you, where would you feel that?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m seeing it in my face and nose, and I’m scrunched up, like “Ugh.”

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah. It could be in your face. For me, and for a lot of people, it’s in the stomach. Like there’s a clenching in the stomach. But that’s interesting. You’re more emotive on the face. So for anxiety, we’ll ask the same people to do the same thing. Find where that feeling is. And it’s often in the pit of the stomach. Then the second question is “Which way is it moving?” And this is a weird one. And it’s kind of hard to imagine this right now. I’m not going to put you on the spot. It’s hard to figure this out, but there’s a trick. If you rotate your finger in one way while you imagine the disgust or the feeling, and then rotate it in another way, one way will make you feel more comfortable and one way kind of doesn’t make you feel comfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild. Wow. Okay. I’m trying to get there so I could experience it for real.

Maneesh Sethi
Sure. So try to feel the disgust and then just…

Pete Mockaitis
One finger on the disgusting. Okay. Big old mess.

Maneesh Sethi
And it might go up or down, but there’s just…

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. When I’m moving it forward, I feel better about the disgusting dishes and smelliness in the sink. And when I’m moving it backward, I am more troubled by it.

Maneesh Sethi
Interesting, right? So now you’ve figured out the way that your sensory input goes through your stomach.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it only for disgust or for everything?

Maneesh Sethi
No, no. For disgust.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Maneesh Sethi
So each different place has its own handle. And what you’ve really discovered here is the handle, that you cannot control the feeling of disgust as it comes to your body, but you can control the way that you rotate it, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Maneesh Sethi
So it’s like you caught it, and now you can go left or right with it. So one of the quickest things you can do is… And you maybe get disgusted a lot and you don’t want to. I don’t know. But imagine, let’s say, your wife left the dishes out and you always get in a fight with her because you get disgusted by the dishes and then something like that happens. I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Maneesh Sethi
And your goal is not to get into fights with her as much or just let it go, like it’s okay sometimes. So now, what you do is wait until the feeling of disgust happens and then you catch yourself. And you can start to say, “Wait, wait, wait. This is okay. I’m allowed to let this happen. Let me rotate this out a little bit. Let me run it through its course, as the sensation just dissipates.”
For other sensations, or even the same one, identifying where it comes from is a really cool trick. So as you start to rewind it, you’ll start to see. It’s really hard to actually detect exactly where it starts from, but you’ll notice you can pull it back and make yourself angry, pull it forward and make yourself less angry. And then each time you do that, especially when you start using the Pavlok, you’ll start to catch yourself a little bit earlier on into the process, and you can identify where in the body that feeling originates. It’s kind of like when you notice your left arm is tingling and then it’s time to call the cops because you might be having a heart attack.
So this was cool for me. I actually just discovered this a few weeks ago. I found my anxiety comes from having to work. Sitting down in front of a document to write makes me very stressed, and I’m not a finisher. And I noticed that my anxiety started in my feet, that as soon as I started to sit down to write something, I would just start tapping my feet and I would just get up and walk away.
And that habit of me being completely distracted and never getting my work done and whenever I have something to do, I always leave the room is because of this little weird feeling that makes my feet just stand up. And then I could notice it, and then I roll it a couple of times, let it course through, and then I’m able to sit down and finish the work.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Maneesh Sethi
So that’s a cool trick for getting over some of those internal feelings.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re blowing my mind here. I thought we were just going to talk about a fun little device. It came to be so much more than I bargained for, and I love it. Thank you. So the key is, then, identify where it is in my body so I got that awareness, and then I see what kind of direction I can wind it, either forward or back. And is that the key, winding? It’s like my finger is extended. For the listeners, it’s extended toward my head. My right finger is extended toward my head, and I’m either moving it forward in circles or I’m moving it backward in circles. Are there other means of winding, or that’s the key? There’s just two?

Maneesh Sethi
I’m not sure, honestly. I know that some people experience it up and down. Some people experience it back and forward in a circle. I just found circles work for me and five or six people I’ve asked this question on. This isn’t my expertise. This is just what I’m excited about right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’ve got to know.

Maneesh Sethi
I’m just really into habits and capabilities, and I’m discovering stuff that’s interesting, and I’m finding it’s much more fundamental than even the product I built.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, this is fascinating. And I’ve got to say, I want to do some more reps and experiments myself to see if I’m believer.

Maneesh Sethi
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
But maybe can you back it up? Is there a cool study or piece of experiment or research on top of this as well?

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah. This is from a book by Richard Bandler on what’s called NLP.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah. And it’s like I used to think NLP was like trying to say words so you could pick up from the game, but it’s like actually about being able to adjust. It’s based on helping people with phobias, addictions, anger issues, or anxiety to get control of their abilities in a way that I very much approve of. And fundamentally, I think Pavlok is a really good example of why I’m excited about what I just told you, which is human beings love to solve problems in very indirect ways. And human beings love to prolong problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Maneesh Sethi
So when you think about the common type of “I’m anxious. I’m depressed. What do I do? I go to a doctor and get meds, or I go to a therapist and have conversations about why this happened for generations, for years.” And you can never finish therapy, and then you discover it’s because of your parents. It’s like you still are sad. Those are two ways that are endemic in American society for fixing a problem of depression, right? And what’s interesting is that there’s another type of science called solutions-focused therapy, where it doesn’t focus on why you have problems, but instead, it focuses on what were the last few times that you didn’t have a problem?
So it’s like some guy comes in and he’s like, “I’m an alcoholic,” and he says, “Okay.” And he says, “I think it’s because my dad,” and he’s like, “I don’t care. When was the last time you didn’t drink all night?” “Well, I guess my son had a soccer game, so I stayed at the soccer game and I played after school with the kids.” “Okay. Cool. So when was the last time before that that you didn’t get drunk?” “Same situation. It was a soccer game.” “Cool. Why don’t you go volunteer at more sports and have your kid play more soccer games, and that will be the first step to solving your alcoholism?” Look for the solution. Look for the bright spots. And try to replicate them as much as possible.
And I think that I’ve been at odds with a lot of people, with the product and the company that I have now, because the idea of an electric… So Pavlok vibrates, beeps, and can release an electric zap to help you adjust bad habits. The idea came because I used to be running my blog and I’m ADD, so I would do experiments to help me change my productivity. I hired a girl whose job was to slap my face every time I went on Facebook, and it quadrupled my productivity. And that post went viral.
And what I found interesting about it is that I’m coming at a problem of I want to exercise, right? If I’m doing math, if I’m doing proof in geometry, you always think about the null hypothesis. You always think about what’s the must? The truth must be. And you break it down. Like there’s a must work, and then it can’t work. If you can’t figure that out, you can never get a proof. So I thought about this ever since I was a kid, when people would be talking about going into the gym and exercising and all that stuff, and I was just like, “If I want to exercise and eat less, based on my old experience with mathematics, my null hypothesis would be this: If I want to go exercise and lose weight, and I have someone standing next to me at all times who never leaves my side, and every time I start to eat unhealthy food, he hits me or pushes the food out of my hand. And if I don’t exercise, he pushes me. Will I exercise and lose weight?” What do you think the answer is?

Pete Mockaitis
I sure think you would. Yeah.

Maneesh Sethi
Probably would, right? If that’s true, what’s the base minimum of that experience that gets us to that solution? And that solution for me was why don’t I hire someone to sit down next to me for a couple of hours and slap me in the face? That’s for productivity. It’s essentially a personal trainer for my productivity. And the slapping never really happened. It happened once or twice. But it was more about the act of having someone sit next to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. She’s watching at the ready.

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah. And it becomes a social experience, and it’s not just me and my computer alone, but now we’re having a person next to me. “Hey, can you look up this image? I’m going to look up this.” In a way, it became my having a personal assistant, right? Like a funny way to describe having a personal assistant. But that idea still resonates with me so much because for some reason, we’re uncomfortable doing that. Like there’s some weird discomfort inside of us, letting somebody else help us.
I don’t understand it. It’s like I feel like there should be, and often, I think we should pivot our business to being an Uber for people who just sit down next to you who don’t leave. Like “Hey, I want to work out.” “Okay. Well, this dude is coming to your house, and he’s not leaving.” Every day, and you hit the Go button, and you can’t get out of it now because he’s going to make you swim or whatever your goal is.
That idea, that mindset is what we’re trying to do in our product. So from our product Pavlok’s perspective, we discovered early on that the zap is a very effective way to break that habit, to help stop smoking, nail-biting, negative thoughts, excessive eating. We found that associating zap with smoking, for example, or with nail-biting creates a Pavlovian association that helps our users quit. What did you use it for?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I was just playing around with it for a couple of days. I don’t really smoke very often, but it’s appealing to me. And I don’t want it to be appealing, so I did it with a cigarette.

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So it’s so funny. I only did for like two-thirds of a cigarette or like 10 shocks with kind of each drag. And it was interesting because the shock experience wasn’t like “Aah!” so much, “It hurts!” so much as it was startling, like “Ooh!” And very unpleasant. It was just like, “I don’t like that.” It’s like if you squirt a dog or a cat with a water pistol. I don’t like that. It was the feeling. And I seemed cool because I’ve long had a rubber band on my wrist that I would snap. Primarily, I didn’t want to have sort of hateful or judgmental thoughts about people toward the whole thing.
And it was helpful. I have fewer of those. But what’s cool about the Pavlok is, well, many things. One, it was more deeply unpleasant. It doesn’t leave red marks. And I think it’s actually a little bit more discreet because it doesn’t make a snap noise. It’s just like no one has to know that I just gave myself a zap. Unless they’re looking closely at my face, then they’ll probably see me go “Ooh!” a little bit.

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah. That’s cool. And have you had a cigarette since, or how does the thought of a cigarette…?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I don’t smoke very often, so it’s not a powerful proof point. But no, I have not.

Maneesh Sethi
Yeah. And think about it next time. You’ll notice the desire. Like if you have the urge and it happens based on some trigger, you’ll notice it and you’ll probably feel the same facial disgust a little bit as your brain re-compares it to the last moment. It’s creating an association. It’s a classical association between disgust and whatever action you do at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s cool and it’s powerful. And I kind of want to dig in a little bit inside your getting started guide or how-to guide that comes with the Pavlok. You mentioned a nifty study with about 1200 folks trying to do some habit-breaking.

Maneesh Sethi
Okay. So first of all, when we started the product, when we started the device idea, it was simply designed to be a replica of the slapping Craigslist girl. So a device that would know when I did stuff, and it would vibrate beepers app based on that. So about a year into the product, we discovered the studies that you’re looking at in that book there right now that showed that manual self-stimulation, self-zap, that even without any software, even without it knowing, would create a classical Pavlovian association known as an aversion.
Essentially, to distill that down, we found out that when it zaps you for doing something, it’s operant positive/negative reinforcement training. And when you zap yourself while you do something, it’s classical aversion training. And while you might need the first operant to make you start doing new things, like new habits, you can simply break bad habits by using classical conditioning in a very quick manner, no software needed. Second part of that is our hardware team was pretty good, and our software team had not completed the apps yet. So it was like, “Great. We can just focus on the hardware.”
So getting back to this, over the last year, we’ve shipped about 15,000 to 20,000 units to our customers. We have thousands of people wearing it every day. Hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of habits have been broken. We’ve heard hundreds of stories of users who used it to quit smoking, to quit nail-biting, to quit trichotillomania (which is hair-picking), to quit saying “uh” and “um,” to quit cursing, negative thoughts, getting over their ex-girlfriends, getting a girlfriend (which is one of my favorites). What else? Obviously, fitness. A lot of people lost weight, like 10 to 15 pounds without having to change their diet or exercise because they stopped snacking in between meals. They stopped late night bingeing. There’s a story about it in the New York Times.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share some maybe workplace or productivity kinds of habits?

Maneesh Sethi
Sure. So productivity and workplace habits. There’s a productivity Chrome extension we released that lets you put down your to-do lists. It’s integrated with Todoist. And it makes you do those action items. So it will continuously remind you until you start focusing on one specific website or one specific task. It blocks beeping and zapping when you go on your blacklisted websites, wasting time on Reddit or whatever. You can integrate it with your RescueTime app. RescueTime is an app that gives you a productivity score between zero and 100, and set it to zap you if you go too low in your productivity and vibrate when you go high.
So some of the habits we’ve had for users like that is morning routines is a big one, which I think is one of the biggest keystone habits one person could have. Then there’s a lot of people who stopped opening so many tabs. We stopped going on Facebook. We stopped social media. A lot of people quit online dating sites. The RescueTime productivity thing is pretty cool because it vibrates when your score is high, so a lot of people will live for that vibration. So once they get in that level, they want to stay there. And so that has been a really big trick for users who want to stay in productive mode.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. And I was wondering about maybe just how broad versus narrow and specific the conditioning response gets to be. So I’m wondering, if someone thinks they drink too much, is it kind of like all or nothing in terms of “I have associated the alcohol to unpleasantness”? And it’s not about social versus alone drinking. It’s drinking. That’s just sort of the way our bodies are wired. Or is there some degree of precision or narrowness, targetedness that can happen?

Maneesh Sethi
I think it’s a lot more decidable than people expect. So first of all, the aversion only gets to become a permanent thing when it’s used while you make yourself do the action and overdo the zapping to create a powerful association. But if you use it less so, like in the moment, like “Oh, I’m at a party and I had two drinks. Maybe I should cut down on drinking for a little bit of time.” “Oh, but I tend to just keep drinking because that’s how my hand goes.” And I press the button three times while I look at the glass of wine and my temptation subsides. Or I’m at a party and I want to be careful of eating too many cookies. I’ll quickly look at a few cookies and press the button a few times, and then I won’t want it as much.
What I think is happening in the brain… And most of your day is spent in the back of your brain called the basal ganglia. That’s where habits are, and a zap is like a surprising factor. It knocks you into prefrontal cortex human mode. Again, I really want to identify if this is all true, but this is just based on my own understanding of the brain that your actual urges… There’s a lot of habitual urges that are not real. Like hunger is a real thing, but wanting more is not a real thing. Overindulging is not a real thing. So when you zap yourself, a lot of the basic cravings will subside. So it will help reduce your likelihood of doing something.
As for the specific, I can say that a lot of the ways you can use it is even without doing the action, but just focusing on the action. We have some audio courses in the app, and it will tell you, “Think about this. So imagine yourself smoking a cigarette and press the button. Imagine the blackness of smoke entering your lungs.” That sort of stuff. And on the other side of it, I used it on tortilla chips and I physically can’t eat Tostitos, and the Tostitos logo hurts me a little bit. But I am able to eat purple tortilla chips at my house, and I’m able to eat non-Tostitos outside of the house.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. So many layers of association.
Well, you tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure that we cover off before we kind of shift gears and hear quickly about a couple of your favorite things?

Maneesh Sethi
Sure. Our newest app will be on the App Store. It’s a habit tracking and habit training app, and it doesn’t require the actual hardware device to use it. So you’ll be able to download that from the App Store. Just go download Pavlok.
I’m happy to answer any questions. My email address is maneesh@pavlok.com. Pleasure to chat.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh. Cool. Thank you. Well, I did have just a couple of rapid fire questions, kind of our standard closer piece. So could you share with us a favorite habit of yours that’s been really instrumental in terms of making a world of difference?

Maneesh Sethi
I’m not very good with habits. To be honest, I’m very bad with habits. So if I look at it, the person who’s good with habits gets off Facebook and does his work. The person who’s bad with habits hires someone to slap him in the face and starts to wear a device to shock him because he can’t focus on his habits.
So I find myself a lot more powerfully motivated by short-term goals with a negative consequence. So bets or competitions. So getting in the habit of setting bets and competitions and deadlines and things that are fixed, that habit for me is pretty powerful. So I’ll set a bet with a friend at the beginning of the year to lose 30 pounds or to squat 300 pounds or something, and that will keep me motivated for a long period of time.
Secondarily, getting the company and the organization in the habit of the things that I always wish I could get myself to do. So getting the company to write down what we do each day and making ourselves chat about what we’re going to do in the morning during a daily stand-up forces me to do so. Our company is beginning a weekly workout in group together. And so getting the company to do work to go exercise makes me exercise. So if I have to do it, then everybody has to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Maneesh Sethi
Other habits that are really powerful. I’d say meditation is a huge one that I think was a powerful habit for me to get. And my newest habit is walking to work while playing Pokémon Go. And ever since I started playing, I’ve lost 15 or 16 pounds and I’ve walked over 300 miles. And so that’s been a really good habit for me to have formed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And two more quick ones. Could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Maneesh Sethi
“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of 10,000 is a statistic.” Joseph Stalin. I am just kidding. That’s not my favorite quote. I was playing Call of Duty, and I was like, “That’s the worst quote I could possibly quote right now. No. My favorite quote is… I’ll give you a couple. The one that was on our box is by Aristotle, and the quote goes, “You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” That’s always been my favorite quote. And then I think that my next favorite quote is “Focus on output” by Tim Ferriss. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a favorite challenge or a parting call to action you’d leave folks with, who are seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Maneesh Sethi
Sure. If there’s some kind of task you’re having trouble doing, make a bet with someone next to you and say, “I will give you $5 if I don’t do this by tomorrow,” and then watch your internal monologue because you’ll find yourself doing it in a really creepy way. And it will just get done, and you won’t lose. It’s pretty cool.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve got to ask about the creepy part.

Maneesh Sethi
Your brain just starts talking. Like usually when you have something you want to do, but you always put it off, your brain gets distracted and things about everything else. Or it gets really nervous and scared about it, but it doesn’t want to do it. Then when you make a bet, your brain starts having this other conversation with you, where it’s like, “Yo, you’re going to get this done.” And for me, I’ll start tricking myself. I’ll be like, “I’m going to get this done, but I’m going to do only this much on it. I’m going to get the bare minimum done to win the bet.” And even though I’m making this up in my head, it still gets done. It’s just the brain, when it has a consequence, starts to think in a different way. So give yourself a small consequence for some small project, and just watch what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, Maneesh, it’s just been a blast. Thanks so much for making the time. And I hope the Pavlok and the other things you’re developing are a smashing success.

Maneesh Sethi
Thank you. Pleasure to chat. Take care, Pete.