Show Notes
Watch the full Change episode on the Solved podcast: https://mrk.mn/change Why do we not do the things we know we should do? The Greeks called it akrasia and treated it as a serious philosophical problem, and in this clip Drew and I get into why willpower is the wrong tool for fixing it. The short version: knowing what to do was never the problem. As my friend Derek Sivers puts it, if change came from more information we'd all be billionaires with six-packs. Behavior change is an emotional problem, not a rational one. Plato basically nailed this 2,400 years ago with the chariot and two horses, and modern psychology has mostly proven him right. So instead of white-knuckling it, the move is to design your environment so the right behavior is the easy one. I get into the checklist that dropped hospital deaths to zero, why you need to change far less than you think, and the embarrassingly simple gym-shoes-by-the-door trick that's done more for me than every dramatic 4:30am life overhaul I've ever failed at. Real change isn't a montage. It's barely above the threshold of perception, and that's exactly why it works.
Chapters
Chapters
00:00:00 Introduction: The 2,500-Year Question We Can't Answer 00:01:03 Akrasia: The Ancient Greek Problem of Weakness of Will 00:02:08 Plato's Tripartite Soul: The Chariot Rider and Two Horses 00:03:38 The Real Problem: Change is Emotional, Not Rational 00:05:11 Why Willpower is Overrated and Usually Fails 00:06:23 The Checklist That Saved 1,500 Lives 00:07:59 Environmental Design: Making Good Behavior Easier Than Bad 00:09:31 The Trap of Imagining Total Life Overhauls 00:10:57 The Power of Sequential Change: One Habit at a Time 00:12:48 What Real Change Actually Feels Like: Boring and Incremental
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Watch the full Commitment episode on the Solved podcast: https://mrk.mn/tc7phn0t. People don't regret the decisions they made. They regret the ones they never got around to making. I've made plenty of bad calls, lost money, embarrassed myself, and the only things I truly regret are the times I hurt someone I love. Drew and I get into the research on regret, Annie Duke's point that we all quit too late, and why a bias toward action beats a bias toward waiting almost every time. You're taking too long to decide, and it's costing you more than a wrong decision ever would.