Video 9 in our series on James Clear's book, Atomic Habits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5_hErN0_QU

Transcription

The Goldilocks Rule.

Hi, I'm Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I'm going to review the final section of Atomic Habits by James Clear, even if you haven't read the book, this is this isn't going to ruin anything for you, it's gonna give you kind of a, it's a good preview, really, for the book if you haven't gotten a chance to read it.

If you have, it's a good review of what was done in this book and the stuff that I thought really stood out.

There's a lot more to it, a lot more areas that I'd love to discuss at a future time.

But right now, I'm just going to pick on a few things and one of them is this Goldilocks Rule.

I'm gonna get to that in a second, but in the first part of this section of the book, he talks about genetics is not being you know, an absolute thing.

I mean, it's absolutely there, there are certain things your desires, the things you're good at the things you aren't good at even your habits, the things that you have more likely a pull toward as a bad habit or things that could be a good habit, and how you handle habits. All this is a genetic situation.

You can't really do much about that other than know what you're dealing with and then move from there. He says in short gene genes do not determine your destiny, they determine your areas of opportunity. As a physician, Gabor Monta noted, "Genes can predispose, but they don't predetermine."

So, they can predispose you to certain things. And there are certain things you'll be interested in, there's a certain amount of IQ and so forth, that's genetic. And that's just the way it is.

I mean, it's just been, it's been proven that these things are so many of these things they just kind of come with, with the job of being a human. And you just got to deal with the equipment that you've been given.

I like this quote, he says you don't have to apologize for these differences or feel guilty about them but you do have to work with them.

That's something we all have to keep in mind, I mean, across the board, but especially when it comes to building habits, you got to realize everyone's a little bit different.

So you can't get too caught up with hearing someone who's had a lot of success in a certain area. And you're having more difficulty in that area. That's just, it's just how we're built.

The Goldilocks rules in an interesting idea.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard, not too easy, just right, like, you know, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

So when you're starting a new habit, it's important to keep the behavior as easy as possible, so you can stick with it even when conditions aren't perfect. This idea we covered in detail while discussing the third law of behavior change. So that's in that section of the book.

Once a habit has been established, however, it's important to continue to advance in small ways. And the reason is, if you're able to see this graph, the Goldilocks Rule, it's it has to do with difficulty and how difficult the task is, if it's not difficult at all, it's really easy to be bored with it.

So as you build up a habit, you get to the point where it's not difficult at all,