James Barry

Ditch Your Phone, Fix Your Mind

by | Mar 4, 2021 | Mindset

Last year I spent a month without a phone.

It. Was. Amazing.

Here’s how the experience went:

Day 1: Sadness. Breaking a phone is a bummer.

Day 2 – 5: Jitters. I reached for my non-existent phone hundreds of times during this period. When it’s no longer there, you realize how often you use it distract yourself.

Day 6 – 14: Full detox. It’s amazing how much more time time you get back when you don’t have your phone.

Day 14 – 30: Bliss. I started living in the moment again.

Day 31: Relapse. I couldn’t get by without 2-factor authentication or navigation.

Phones & Dopamine

While phones aren’t all bad, having a tiny computer in your pocket 24/7 can reduce your happiness. That’s because using your phone can provide small dopamine hits, which leads into a 3-stage negative feedback loop.

Stage 1: Your realize phones are awesome! Maybe it’s a positive email. Likes on your photo. A fun mobile game. Whatever it is, your brain loves it.

Stage 2: Your brain automatically seeks the same reward. However, it’s not always there. It a psychology conditioning quite similar to slot machines, where you pull the lever (i.e. take out your phone) MORE often when the outcome is random.

Stage 3: You enter a negative feedback cycle. Using your phone for long periods of time makes you unhappier. To combat this you begin to seek small dopamine rewards to balance it out.

Try to spend half the day without your phone and count how many times you instinctively reach for it. The number will probably be higher than you think.

Commitment Devices That Don’t Suck

by | Feb 25, 2021 | Time Allocation

In the 1519s, six hundred men arrived by boat at the Yucatan Peninsula determined to explore the New World and its riches. First though, they did one thing: sunk their ships so there was no possibility of returning home.

This action, ordered by their captain Hernán Cortés, made it clear that their only option was to continue on their path forward and it’s an extreme version of what is known as a “Commitment Device”.

Commitment devices, at their core, are a method which allows you to make a current decision that either encourages, or discourages, a future action. If you’re lucky, the first commitment device you had in your life was your parents. Growing up in their household committed you to living by their rules and expectations.

Once you grow up though and enter the world, you’re on your own. Without commitment devices, it can become hard to make progress on goals because you need to rely completely on willpower, which can be HARD. You don’t have an infinite amount of it and willpower varies day-to-day, which in the end can lead to inconsistent results when it comes to your goals

That’s where commitment devices come in. There are many different commitment devices out there, but they usually fall into three distinct categories: Restrictive, Public, and Sunk Cost.

Restrictive Commitment Devices

Restrictive commitment devices are ones that stop you from doing something in the future and they are most effective at removing bad habits. Usually they do this by increasing the friction of a bad habit (i.e. unplugging your TV to make it harder to watch) or they make it completely impossible (completely getting rid of your TV).

Common restrictive commitment devices:

  1. Internet blocking apps. I use StayFocusd to set my surfing limit on Reddit to 30 minutes each day.
  2. Deleting apps off the phone. I haven’t had Facebook on my phone in years.
  3. Avoiding buying unhealthy food. If you don’t have junk food, you can’t eat junk food.

Restrictive commitment devices are far and away my favorite approach to stopping bad habits. They are easy to create and if you implement them correctly, you’ll be able to benefit from them for a long-time.

Pros: Incredibly easy to implement 

Cons: Hard to undo (by design).

Great For: Stopping bad habits

Public Commitment Devices

A public commitment device is one that uses social pressure to encourage or discourage a certain behavior. While many people have seen success with these, the downside is they rely on fear for motivation. They can be effective in the short-term, but it’s hard to make changes stick for the long-term unless there’s another underlying motivation.

Common public commitment devices:

  1. Announcing your New Year’s resolution to your family.
  2. Posting an announcement online that you’re going to start a business.
  3. Telling a group of friends you’re going to stop drinking.
  4. Committing to working out with a gym buddy.

For me, I’ve done all of the above (except for #3) and they have all failed at one point or another. The only public commitment device I’ve seen real success with is this blog. The key differentiator for me was that I wrote on my own for a few months before publishing the blog. Then, only after I had published articles for over a month, did I finally make a small public announcement.

The commitment device in this instance is really just an addition to another goal that I have, which was to start writing more. That goal came first, and the fact that I turned this into a public commitment device provided additional positive reinforcement.

Good for: Building selective new habits.

Pros: Highly binding, especially in the short-term.

Cons: Not as effective as you’d like them to be. High potential for public embarrassment which can damage your mindset and goal setting.

Sunk Cost Commitment Devices

These are the worst type of commitment devices. They rely on the idea that once you pay money for something, you’re more likely to do it. Avoid these at all costs. Common sunk cost devices:

  1. Buying a year long gym membership
  2. Purchasing an annual subscription to a wellness app 
  3. Getting that sweet, sweet Peloton you always wanted

Now that is not to say, don’t buy a gym membership or a Peloton. Just don’t go and buy those if the primary goal of your purchase is to develop a new habit. If you go into it with that goal, you’ll likely join the one extremely large group of others who make up the $1.8 billion of unused gym memberships each year.

Good For: Nothing

Pros: These make you feel good in the short-term.

Cons: Ineffective. Prone to the fallacy of sunk cost.

Contractual and Financial Commitment Devices

Contracts are not normally referred to as commitment devices, but at their core that is what they are.

When you enter into any type of contract, whether it’s with your employer, the bank, or the government, you are committing to fulfill your side of the contract. However, this post is not about contracts. This post is about improving yourself.

Some people do use these though to reinforce specific types of behaviors. Examples that I have seen:

  1. Signing contracts with trainers to hit certain goals (or pay them money).
  2. Creating a curse jar so you stop using swear words.
  3. Joining the army to get in better shape.

Good for: Financial decisions

Pros: Legally binding. There will be consequences.

Cons: Legally binding. There will be consequences.

In Summary…

Commitment devices often fail because they were not built on a strong foundation. People make big announcements about how they’re going to change (New Year’s Resolutions come to mind?), but after that initial burst of enthusiasm fades, so does your commitment.

With enough effort, any commitment device can be undone. So before you put them in place, think long and hard about why you are doing it.

Why You Should Always Question the Default

by | Feb 18, 2021 | Favorites, Mindset

Every single day, you accept decisions that were made for you.

It may be the font on your screen, the layout of your inbox, or the arrangement of the icons on your phone.

Now you may be thinking “No, not me, I’ve selected all of those. I’m an individual!”.

Have you looked at the humidity setting on your fridge or the factory settings on your house’s router? Probably not.

Default choices exist all around us in our lives because they make life easier. These “defaults” usually end up being the most popular option since they are the easiest, lowest friction ones to choose. Just by doing nothing, you choose them.

When you start changing defaults though, you can start making tiny improvements each day to your life that will quickly compound over time.

Do you question defaults? Just look at your browser.

In 2015 a study was run to better understand what impacts employee retention and success.

The hypothesis was that job hoppers (i.e. employees with 5+ jobs in the past 5 years) would be more likely to leave their current job earlier than non-job hoppers. The study ended up finding no correlation between the number of previous jobs and likelihood to leave, but they had access to another dataset: The browser that the applicant applied through.

It turns out employees who applied using a non-default browser (such as Brave or Firefox) ended up staying in their positions for 15% longer. The data also showed that the same employees saw increases in other performance metrics such as total sales made and customer satisfaction.

The theory is that employees who question the default have a higher likelihood of choosing options that would make them more successful. Whether or not it was trying out new sales tactics or exploring a better way to help customers, their mindsets were constantly focused on finding a better way to do something.

How To Use Defaults To Your Advantage

Steve Jobs famously wore one outfit: a black turtleneck, a pair of Levi jeans, and New Balance sneakers. It was his default outfit, and it allowed him to remove the decision making process of what to wear from his schedule. He wore this same outfit for over two decades, and in doing so saved countless hours of time.

While this is extreme, it’s an example of the power that actively adding defaults into your life can have. It commits your future self to a decision and simplifies your choices. These decisions can quickly compound over time and can be used to improve nearly every single area of your life.

Here are my 5 personal favorites defaults:

  1. Always have a glass of water or water bottle nearby: Water is great for you, and this will help you drink more. I absolutely love water.
  2. Don’t sleep next to your phone. You won’t use it before you sleep and you won’t use it when you wake up. Put your phone charger somewhere far away.
  3. Get a phone holder for your car. A small one, but this will guarantee you don’t drive while navigating on your phone.
  4. Turn off all notifications on your phone. Nothing on your phone is urgent so you don’t need to be checking it 100+ times a day. If it’s urgent, somebody will call you.
  5. Always have an Audiobook or Podcast in que. Whether you’re cleaning, driving, walking, or doing most daily tasks, defaulting to listening to something that is educational or enjoyable is a great way to improve every experience.

This is by no means an exhaustive list and I skipped over some pretty big ones (like having an automatic savings account), but the above are the ones that have had the biggest effects on my life.

How Companies Influence Your Behavior Through Defaults

Companies have a lot to gain, or lose, by changing default choices. The most common way this is done is through opt-in or opt-out choices.

  1. Opt-in: You need to actively choose to do something.
  2. Out-out: You need to actively choose to NOT do something.

Opt-out options are everywhere. You see them in the form of automatic renewals, pre-checked newsletter signups, or auto-upgrades for your trip. They can sometimes make your life easier, but often they are not in your best interest.

One of the most exploitive opt-out options was created by banks that automatically added overdraft protections to consumers bank accounts.

An overdraft happens when you spend more money in your bank account than you don’t have. Most people (including myself) have done this at least once. While the name “overdraft protection” implies that it will “protect you”, it actually does the opposite. This option made overdrafts more common. Imagine you have a low bank account balance and go buy something with a debit card. Here is what would happen with, and without, overdraft protect:

  1. Without overdraft protection, the transaction would be declined. 
  2. With overdraft protections, the transaction would be completed but the bank will charges you a fee, usually $35.

Banks made, and still make today, BILLIONS off of overdraft fees. It’s one of their primary sources of revenue and until the government stepped it, it was the default choice for many consumers. Companies that provide free services need to make money somehow. One of the best ways for them to make more money, is to change the default choices you have, which is usually worse for you. They may choose to share your data, opt you into more expensive programs, or hide programs that should be free from you.

Be careful of the defaults that people pick for you. Unless you pick them yourself, you can never be sure that they are in your best interest.

The Worry Equation

by | Feb 11, 2021 | Mindset

In the field of economics there is a widely known concept known as the utility equation. Created by Daniel Bernoulli, it states that people will keep on making decisions as long as it increases their utility (a.k.a. you receive personal satisfaction and/or the decision provides some type of benefit).

For example, let’s say you have a plate of cookies in front of you and you’re fairly hungry. Not starving, but you’re hungry.

When you eat the 1st cookie, it’s one of the best things you’ve ever tasted in the world. You gain lots of utility.

When you eat the 2nd cookie, it’s pretty great, but it’s just not as good as the first one. You gain some utility, but not as much.

You continue eating cookies until you finally get to the point where you don’t want any more. Maybe you’re full, maybe you want to avoid the extra calories. Whatever the reason is, you absolutely do not want another single cookie.

Graphically, your experience would look something like this:

Right around cookie #10 you don’t care anymore. You could eat it, you could not, But after cookie #10, that is it. You absolutely do not want to eat any more cookies.

This equation is pretty straightforward since, at a clear point in time, you know for certain that you won’t gain anything by eating anymore. So you stop. You stop because there’s an immediate link between the benefit (or lack thereof) of eating another cookie.

However, this isn’t so straightforward for other things in life, such as worrying. When you begin to worry, there isn’t a direct link between you worrying and the benefit you get from worrying.

Worry exists for really only one reason: To make your brain focus on a specific task. It might be about the test you have coming up, the important in-person interview, or a public speech you’re being forced to give at a wedding.

Regardless of what you’re brain is demanding you concentrate on, you only get so much benefit from spending your precious time thinking about it. Graphically, it looks something like this:

Notice the steep drop off after the initial stages of worry. This happens because there is only one thing to be gained from worrying, and that is for you to concentrate on the root cause of the worry, a.k.a. “The Peak Of Realization”. At this peak, your brain has done its job and directed its attention to what you need to focus on (even if you can only address the problem at a later point in time).

After you pass this peak, you’ll very quickly enter “The Trough Of Worry”. In the Trough Of Worry, you gain nothing by continuing to think about the problem. In fact, you’ll likely lose something, whether it be time, sleep, or your hair.

Over worrying exists because you either can’t, or won’t take action. Therefore when you realize you are over worrying, you should ask yourself two questions (if it helps, say it out loud):

  1. Is there anything I can do to fix this?
  2. If not, then why am I worrying about it?

These two questions will help reset your mind and have it focus on what you can control, and what you can’t control. They allow you to take a step back and rationally think about the problem.

While this is a drastic oversimplification of the concept of worry, this is the best mental model I have found to put my mind at ease when I find myself over worrying. Snapping yourself back to normal may not always be easy, but if you ask yourself the two questions above, it will at least help make a difference.

A Simple Way To Test Out Your Life Path

by | Feb 4, 2021 | Mindset

All of us have a dream of who we will one day be.

Once we have that prestigious career, receive that graduate degree, make it as that famous artist, or win a gold medal.

The problem with that dream though is that it focuses on the outcome:

  1. Prestigious Career: A prestigious title, high salary, and everything else that comes with being the boss.
  2. Graduate Degree: An achievement and knowledge that separates you from the rest of the pack.
  3. Famous Artist: Fame and money.
  4. Gold Medal: Knowing that you are #1 in the world at something.

An outcome is just a snapshot in time though. 

What you’re actually signing up for is the day-to-day grind it takes to get to that achievement.

  1. Prestigious Career: Late nights and weekends spent grinding on the corporate ladder
  2. Graduate Degree: Late nights studying and student debt
  3. Famous Artist: Years of failure, rejections, no money, and no guarantee of success.
  4. Gold Medal: 4 years of commitment to nothing but your chosen sport.

Every single choice in life you make has a downside so you’re really not picking what outcome you want, but more what you want your day-to-day to be.

It’s much easier to commit to something if you just dream of the outcome, but you’re more likely succeed if you approach decisions as a commitment to a specific day-to-day grind. The grind is guaranteed to be there, but the outcome is not.

Test The Waters

Once you understand that you’re signing up for the day-to-day commitment, it’s much easier to test out what a certain life path or dream will require by simply doing it.

When I first had the idea for creating this blog, I began writing sporadically after work everyday. About issues I was facing, about discoveries I’d read in other books, or just to distract myself from whatever was currently top of mind.

Through that process, I learned that writing was something that I really enjoyed doing. 

So much so that I was happy to spend my time outside work doing it. This experience gave me confidence that when I launched this blog I would be able to achieve my goal of becoming a write not because it was a dream, but because I enjoyed (or at least didn’t hate) the day-to-day activity of it.

This tactic can be used in most other areas throughout your life.

Want to make a jump in your career? 

Start by publishing a newsletter in the industry or position you want to move into. Solidify yourself as an expert.

Want to become a famous artist?

Commit to practicing and putting out songs on a clear schedule.

Want to become a writer?

Put out articles on a consistent schedule.

Consistency

This approach will teach you immediately what day-to-day grind you are signing up for.

Increase Your Failure Speed

One of the best parts of this strategy is it will help you quickly identify what you don’t enjoy doing. The faster you discover what you don’t enjoy, the sooner you can spend time exploring more options so you can find something .

This experimental creation phase is where you should be allocating the majority of your time early on in your life.

The key to discovering where you’ll succeed in life isn’t about discovering what you want or your passion, it’s discovering what type of daily grind and pain you can take. For most, it tends to be where you constantly allocate your free time when nobody else is watching.

For me, I realized that this was reading about self-improvement. It was where my mind constantly wandered so beginning to write about it made sense. To get here I pursued dozens of incorrect paths in life, but that is all part of the journey.

The Bottom Line

When in doubt, just try something new. It doesn’t need to be out of your comfort zone and it doesn’t require a huge life leap. The more you experiment, the closer you’ll be to finding something that you love.

You’ll never know where you will end up.