Lou: This is episode 49 of Write While True. Write While True is an infinite loop, and that’s because we think of writing as an infinite game, a game we’re playing for fun and to get better at, like a game of catch. So in each episode, we’ll tell you something we learned about writing, and then we’ll throw you the ball with a writing challenge or a prompt.
I’m Lou Franco.
Brian: And I’m Brian Hall. Today, we’re going to talk about habits. So where do you want to start?
Lou: So when I think about habits, I think about this book called Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg. He’s a researcher at Stanford University. And he writes about behavior, and he came up with this model, the Fogg model of habits. And what he says is that if you want to try to get a behavior to happen, three things need to happen at the same time.
One, you need to have the motivation to do it. Two, you need to have the ability to do the thing. And then the third one is you need some sort of prompt that gets you to remember that you wanted to do the thing that you have the ability to do and that you’re motivated to do. And then if all those three things come together, you’ll do the behavior.
And his big takeaway and why the book is called Tiny Habits is that the thing that you could easily change is your ability to do something. And the way you do that is by making the habit so tiny that it’s impossible not to have the ability to do it. For example, if you want to start a gym habit, going to the gym habit, he would say the tiny action, the tiny habit would be to just take out your gym clothes. What do you think about that, Brian?
Brian: Yeah, I think this makes a lot of sense. I haven’t read the book, but I must have caught some of these ideas somewhere on the internet because I have tried this. And I will say when it comes to writing, the low bar being something like Morning Pages, which you discussed in a previous episode, where you’re just journaling, you’re just writing, it’s maybe stream of consciousness.
So it’s not something you intend to publish. You don’t have to have that high standard. It doesn’t have to be original or clever. You are just doing the act of writing. And for me, historically, first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee has been a pretty solid and reliable trigger. So am I getting this right? That it’s, I make the coffee, I sit down at my desk, I take a sip, and I start, I just start to type or write without any attachment to how long I’ll do it or what it’s going to be.
Lou: I think what, I think so. And I think the way Fogg recommends that you do it is to actually write a commitment statement about it. So like, whenever I dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, then I will dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.
So whenever I take my first sip of coffee, then I will open up my journal to a blank page as a tiny action. And then, you know, the idea is that hopefully you’ll do more, more than that, but you’re only committed to that tiny action as a starting.
Brian: It really does work. I can say, at least from my experience, that you start off with morning pages, you start off just typing whatever’s on your mind. It might feel like a little self-therapy session when you begin, but almost without fail, you get that stuff out and you’re already in writing mode. And so you start to think, well, okay, I could do a blog post about this or, oh, this is relevant to that chapter of my book that I’ve been stuck on.
And so just getting yourself in position and getting started in this way tends to lead to more powerful, robust output. I guess I’ve reached the point where just by starting consistently every morning, I was cranking out a blog post a day for quite a while. And I guess that’s the other thing I’ll say too, is habits can come and go. You can lose a habit and it’s probably not helpful to beat yourself up about that because you can also regain them. If you’re in the middle of a sprint, you might write every single morning and you might produce quite a bit. And then you might finish that book or reach the end of that series of blog posts. And maybe you abandon your habit. It’s there to be reclaimed, I guess.
Lou: Absolutely. So one of the things I’ve talked about in this podcast was a thing I learned from Art and Fear, where there’s a difference between stopping and quitting. So quitting is you stop and you never restart. And stopping is just a natural thing that you might do, a break you might take.
And you are, as you say, wouldn’t beat myself up over it. If it’s not something that’s right for me now, then that’s fine. I mean, an example of, you know, even this podcast, I, the last episode was months ago.
Sorry. The last episode was the one we did together to restart season five, but the episode before that was months ago. And there have been big breaks in this podcast, but I don’t consider myself to have quit the podcast because I do have the intention of keeping it going indefinitely. And I just re-pick it up when I have the energy.
Brian: Yeah. And in that framing, a habit is kind of like a tool or just a capability that you have. You can initiate and sustain a writing habit to get some writing done, to get unstuck or to get to the end of a project, or just to give yourself a nice, calm morning ritual, if that’s something that you need. And it goes where it goes for however long it goes and can come back.
So I think for a takeaway for this episode, tell me if I’m doing this right. I have been meaning to get back into daily blogging, but to say I’m going to do daily blogging is a little too vague and too much by the Fogg Model. And so what I’ll say is in the morning, when I take my first sip of coffee, I’ll open up my laptop and just start typing and I’ll see where that gets me. And if I have so much on my mind that all I do is create gibberish morning pages, stream of consciousness mess that I just delete, that’s okay. But I know myself. And I think if I just start, I’ll get somewhere with it. Does that, did I do it right?
Lou: I mean, absolutely. If I were going to recommend a slight change, I think I would say that you might want to in some way prompt it more than just it being stream of consciousness, because I don’t know about your morning pages, but my morning pages are not going to ever lead to a blog post because they’re literally about total random. I mean, in some ways, nonsense, dreams, memories, relationship stuff. All kinds of stuff. So, I think to get it towards something that would be publishable, maybe come up with a good reusable prompt that you could then write towards whatever the theme of your blog is. So, for mine, I might have a couple of reusable prompts, something like, I remember this time at work where dot, dot, dot, and then the resulting thing will probably be publishable. What do you think about that?
Brian: Yeah, I think that’s great. So in the morning when I take my first sip of coffee, I’ll open up my laptop and I’ll start writing based on a prompt that suits my blog. So first I have to go figure out what those are, but that’s not going to be too hard.
Lou: That sounds good. I think, you know, honestly, my blog has been languishing. I try to publish at least a few posts a month. And I’ve been doing that, but maybe I’ll do the same thing and maybe in the next episode, we’ll keep talking about habits. We’ll talk about what happened when we both tried this because it’ll be a little time from now. We hopefully we’ll both have posted something between now and then.
Okay. Well, I think we’ve come to an end, Brian. Uh, this has been Write While True, a podcast where we love infinite loops as long as they’re fun.