Audiobook Audition
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
introduction. The laziness of success. If you were lazy you have a superpower. I know that sounds crazy but hear me out. Your superpower has nothing to do with power naps. It doesn't involve marathon tv binge sessions, it has no connection to your olympic ability to smash the snooze button on your alarm. This superpower has everything to do with you, achieving the kinds of goals that will allow you to make a difference in your life and in the life of others. It's a superpower that will allow you to live large and be bold. There's just one problem while your laziness is a superpower, it is also your achilles heel that can lead to your talents and skills going to waste. So often the most talented lazy people live out lives in a vague haze of wishes instead of clear goals, strong habits and bigger than life accomplishments instead of learning a new language. So you can get the most out of your trip to Qatar, you laze about and watch tv instead of working on your painting, you scroll through some other artists instagram page instead of polishing your business plan, you doze off in front of a random startups blog. Sound familiar, we've all been there, done that. It ends today. Maybe you don't believe me. Maybe you think your goals are too big for your lazy ways but I have news for you. Your laziness is a secret weapon precisely because the best way to build strong habits are also the lazy man's bread and butter. The easiest way to build great habits is to take tiny steps. Your lazy tiny is your jam. The best way to break bad habits is take the lazy route and build on the bad habits you already have instead of starting from scratch. I bet you hate starting from scratch, you know how I know because you're lazy and so am I, I'm so lazy. It took me over a decade to finally write my first book. I tried everything, I read articles about book writing, I read books about book writing, I sat down and scribbled and scribbled and scribbled some more, but I gave up each and every time as it turns out, I hadn't tried everything to accomplish my goal. I took the heart approach, I tried to overhaul my willpower so that I could write a book only I failed time and again, then one day I decided forget that I'm going to write a book the lazy way, you know what got me to finally achieve my goal habits. Tiny tiny habits that I was able to implement each day because they were too easy not to do when I was done, I had a short book under my belt, that short book became a stepping stone to another book and another and another. I finished each book, thanks to the power of my laziness to take tiny daily steps, no matter whether you want to write a book or draw cartoons or pass your math class, you can do the same. This book is broken into three sections. Part one is all about the foundations. Part two will introduce you to an anatomy of every habit. Part three will help you. Supercharge how you use your habits. So you find success the easy way in the following pages, you'll learn the right mindset to build better habits and break the bad ones, why you failed before, so you don't fail again. What habits are and how to break them into their components to make them work for you. The power of tiny repetitions. This is a major arsenal in your laziness, superpower how to track habits, to boost your motivation, how to build good habits on the smoking ruins of the bad ones, how to choose a habit to stick with and create ripples in all areas for your life. I'm not going to pretend you can build good habits and break bad ones with zero work, but you can absolutely lean into your laziness to create changes that improve your life career and confidence. The changes you will make will be so small that there is no reason to wait till the right time, the right time is now. So let's get started. Note the stories you read are taken from real life experiences. I've changed the names of the subjects for the sake of privacy. Part one, The Foundations, I know you're itching to find out all about the ins and outs of habits, but you would never build a house without a strong foundation to make sure habit formation becomes a way of life for you. I will show you why habits are the lazy approach to successful living. I will also explain why you have failed before that way, failure will no longer be a bad habit. Chapter one Why Lazy people should love habits, spoiler? They do the work for us to grasp why habits are the lazy person's best friend. Let's lay the groundwork of what habits are a habit. According to Miriam Webster dictionary is an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary. In other words, their actions we take without even necessarily thinking about them or at the very least we do them without having to consciously make a decision to do so. A habit is a behavior that in many respects has become part of who we are for lazy people like us. That's a very good thing, motivating ourselves to take action is hard. The more we can turn our behavior into a set of habits, the less we will have to make decisions and push ourselves to act on those decisions. You've seen how habits work and their benefit many times every time you brush your teeth. In fact, when you get up in the morning, you don't have to consider all the ramifications of brushing versus not brushing your teeth. You don't say to yourself to brush or not to brush on a scale of 1-10. How donkey does my mouth feel? You know what? This is an important decision. I'm going to call my boss and tell him I'll be running late because I have to do a pros and cons list about brushing my teeth. No one does that, not even the laziest among us. We have the habit of brushing our teeth and so we do it without nary a thought. In fact the task is so automatic, it doesn't even feel like work. This is why habits are so powerful. They benefit us because they do so much of the work for us. Or at least it feels that way habits also help us deal with the difficulties life throws at us according to behavioral scientist, Jason. Herrera habits are reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment. They achieved two things according to author James clear in his book, atomic cabins habits help us get something we want or alleviate negative things like pain doesn't so much of our life boil down to those two urges. I want my mouth to feel minty fresh. So I brushed my teeth. I want to avoid feeling sluggish. So I have some caffeine. I want to reach my goals. So I read self help books in a sense there is no such thing as a bad and a good habit. Every habit is meant to solve the problem in solving that problem. We may end up with negative consequences. Eating ice cream every day may lead to weight gain, diabetes, tooth decay, etcetera. Other habits lead to good consequences. Exercise helps us to lose weight and become stronger despite the distinction. I will continue to use terms like bad habits and good habits because we both know what I mean by that and because it'll get clunky to keep saying habits that lead to bad consequences. The point to keep in mind is that in our day to day lives we've learned solutions to help us avoid pain and obtain benefit. This learning result results in a habit if we want to relieve stress and thoughtlessly plow through a bowl of ice cream every day after work. That's a habit that will lead to weight gain and other health issues. The ice cream alleviates one problem in a moment while causing other problems down the road. If we want to relieve stress and automatically take a nice long walk after work, we will see improvements in our health. Both habits though, have the same goal relieve stress. How our habits formed habits are formed because we human beings are capable of learning as a neuroscientist. Andrew Andrew her. Berman says habits are things our nervous system learned, but not always consciously. You never set out to make teeth brushing a habit. Your parents kept telling you to brush your teeth till one day you did it without thinking. Although we picked up many of our habits subconsciously, Doctor who Berman's statement contains good news for all of us. If some habits are learned, but not always consciously, it means we can learn habits consciously. We are capable of actively building habits that will likewise build our success. The good news is that creating habits doesn't have to be as hard as people make it out to be more on that later. Thanks to our brain's neural plasticity, we can learn pretty much anything, a new language, how to ride a bike or how to repeat the same behavior. Day after day, learning is just another way of saying that we're creating bridges between our neurons. These bridges build neuro pathways that I like to visualize as roads. When you're first learning a language for example, you struggle. The neuro pathway hasn't been created yet. With practice. The connections are created between neurons get stronger and stronger till one day you're able to prattle on in your target language without any trouble or you stop having to be told to brush your teeth by your parents, you just do it both. Good and bad habits are created the exact same way through learning. Can I break bad habits according to the latest research, we can't get rid of bad habits or good ones for that matter. We can only make one habit stronger so that it takes priority over others. To illustrate what I mean. Let's use an example. Perhaps a person wants to develop a habit of exercising each day. His current habit is to get up every morning and eat syrupy pancakes with powdered sugar. No doubt this habit was formed because the morning treat was comforting before a hard day of work, his alarm went off, he ate his pancakes, the hit of sugar comforted him and voila. The pancake breakfast became associated with waking up. That eating habit was something he learned through repetition. If he changes his behavior and gets up and runs instead, his brain still has the neuro pathway for the pancake habit, we can think of the pathway as a rut that a wheel travels along the deeper the rut, the more easily the wheel moves forward. This is not a scientific way of describing it by the way, but it demonstrates my point when he first decides to exercise that pancake run as strong. The exercise behavior isn't yet a habit, it hasn't yet been learned and the neural pathways for exercising every morning have not yet been formed. What's more, the neural pathways for our old habits never disappeared. This is why we can't simply break a habit off. That's the bad news, but I promise there is good news as well. Remember earlier, I used the word neural plasticity, the brain is capable of changing or learning new things and most important for us of building new neural pathways as you exercise each day. You will learn the new behavior till it becomes a habit if you keep up the exercise, good habits are strengthened the same way as bad habits are, we can't truly break bad habits, but we absolutely can break the habits power over us, the more we practice the good habit, the deeper the rut becomes till we default to the good habit rather than the bad one. In other words, we can break the bad habit down bit by bit like stone, getting eroded by the constant flow of water. This process alone is powerful because it allows us to choose which habit we want to strengthen. We simply have to repeat an action enough till our brain learns it cold. If we superimpose the good habit over the bad one even better More about that. In chapter nine in this book, I will use the term break habits simply because it's recognizable, but each time you read it, know that what we're really talking about is breaking the habits power over us by understanding the grip old habits have on us. You are one step closer to being able to approach habit creation the lazy way, you know, your main focus won't be breaking old habits, you will put your energy into creating new ones that become so strong, they override the old ones. This alone will save you a lot of work and stress, take stock of your habits. As the saying goes, know, thy enemy take a few moments to consider what habits you have, grab something to write with and list out both bad habits because these habits you will be working to weaken, but also good habits because we all need a boost of confidence. If you aren't sure whether a habit is good or bad, it might be neutral mark. It is such now as you work through the book, keep the list handy so that you can use the information in the chapters that follow to understand your own good and bad habits better now that you know what a habit is and how it is formed. I will talk about why you have failed to break bad habits and build good ones in the past. Once you know the problem, it's much easier to come to a solution and well lazy people love things to be easy, don't we?