The Weekly Circle #6
Welcome to the sixth episode of The Weekly Circle. A free Circles in Time newsletter released every Sunday.
Hey everybody,
The third edition of the Circles in Time programme got off to a great start this week. The cohort is as smart and curious as the previous two, with a variety of interesting and different personalities, from diverse backgrounds. This made the workshops a vibrant space for learning and discussion. There is just something so amazing about a behavioural researcher sitting in Taiwan helping a South African practitioner explore their aspirationals goals, or a consultant from the US providing feedback on the behaviours of a content manager living in the South of France. The whole thing really excites me!
Highlight of the Week
A highlight for me this week came from the first workshop session on Saturday. As part of one of the exercises, participants were tasked with identifying deliberately broad, vague and fuzzy aspirational goals, that they could see themselves holding over the long term.
One of the participants shared that their primary and perennial aspiration is to ‘wake up every morning feeling excited and go to bed every night feeling content’. I love this. It is simple, yet captures so much. It focuses on the present, but you can also see yourself holding it over the long run. It is vague and fuzzy, yet a clear north star that you can continuously return to for direction. It reveals strong intentionality, but also an acceptance of the uncertainties that come with a changing, complex reality.
WORLD VIEWS
Here are the ideas I’ve been circling around this week.
THE WORLD AROUND US
Contextual Cues, Triggers, Prompts & Anchors
The suggested paths to habit formation vary in many ways, but what they all seem to have in common is the importance of some initial feature that activates a particular behavioural response.
These initiating features are often described as contextual cues, prompts, triggers or anchors. These cues always immediately precede a behavioural response. I often think of them as commands that, when activated, run a particular piece of biological code responsible for a set of specific habitual activities operating with little-to-no conscious awareness.
How behavioural scientists and habit experts think about these cues:
“A habit happens when a context cue is sufficiently associated with a rewarded response to become automatic, to fade into that hardworking, quiet second self. That’s it. Cue and response. Notice that there’s no room in that mechanism for, well, you. You’re not a part of it, not as you probably think of yourself. You—your goals, your will, your wishes—don’t have any part to play in habits. Goals can orient you to build a habit, but your desires don’t make habits work. Actually, your habit self would benefit if “you” just got out of the way.” ~ Wendy Wood
“Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change techniques can backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating. Showing pictures of blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher levels of anxiety, which drives many people to reach for a cigarette. If you’re not careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop.” ~ James Clear
Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked and Indistractable, describes cues as external and internal triggers. Here is how he thinks about them:
“External triggers tell the user what to do next by placing information within the user’s environment. Internal triggers tell the user what to do next through associations stored in the user’s memory.”
“New habits are sparked by external triggers, but associations with internal triggers are what keeps users hooked. When a product is tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing habit, it creates an “internal trigger.”
Cues are of primary focus in all the most familiar habit formation models:
Books that get into the details on contextual cues, prompts, triggers and anchors:
THE WORLD BETWEEN US
Getting By with a Little Help from My Friends
The psychologist and author, Susan Pinker, wrote a fascinating book called ‘The Village Effect’. In it, she makes the case that strong social relationships are as important to our long term health and happiness as any other major risk factor.
The piece below gives a concise summary of her book’s thesis:
“In fact, neglecting to keep in close contact with people who are important to you is at least as dangerous to your health as a pack-a-day cigarette habit, hypertension, or obesity.”
Here is Susan Pinker talking about her key ideas from the TED stage:
With all the benefits that digital technology brings us, a clear downside is the loss of close contact that Pinker says is so vital to our lives. We substitute the complex, messiness of close relationships for what, the social scientist, Sherry Turkle, calls ‘convenient communications’.
She writes in her book ‘Alone Together’:
“As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy.”
Getting intentional about social connection
So close social relationships are crucial for a happy and healthy life. But can we build these connections in a digital world? Let’s hope so. Perhaps it just means we all just need to be a lot more intentional, attentional and compassionate when it comes to building bonds. Where to start?
THE WORLD WITHIN US
Fitbit for your Brain
On Friday Elon Musk’s Neuralink, did a live demonstration of the brain-implant product that the company is creating. Watching it felt like some bizarre combination of Black Mirror, Okja and Ready Player One. Fascinating and inspiring, yet at the same time, dark and unsettling.
Here are the highlights from the live demonstration:
WISE WORDS
The quotes I’ve been circling around this week
KNOWING YOUR LIMITS
"We know the past but cannot control it. We control the future but cannot know it." ~ Claude Shannon
“One only sees what one looks for. One only looks for what one knows.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
MAKING DIFFICULT DECISIONS
"It is not in the still calm of life or the repose of a pacific station that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties." ~ Abigail Adams
"Being busy is a form of laziness. Lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is often used as a guise for avoiding a few critically important but uncomfortable actions." ~ Tim Ferriss
"Life might be a race against time but it is enriched when we rise above our instincts and stop the clock to process and understand what we are doing and why. A wise decision requires reflection, and reflection requires a pause." ~ Frank Partnoy
ON FRIENDSHIP
"A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself- and especially to feel, or not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at any moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is." ~ Jim Morrison
COMMUNITY UPDATE
The community members are moving into the third week of their second personal experiments. From what I’ve heard, these seem to be progressing nicely.
On a separate note, the member’s book club gets going tomorrow. I’ve been thinking about how to do the activity in a unique and hopefully original way. More on this soon.
There will also be a series of announcements next week about the Sample of One podcast. This was supposed to launch this week, but I decided to hold off until everything is set up and in place. It’s another experimental arm of Circles in Time that I’m very excited about, with a combined webinar format that seems slightly different to how podcasting is conventionally approached. Curious how the whole thing will unfold.
SOMETHING TO PART WITH
Take care,
David