Written by Christopher Kelly
Nov. 20, 2014
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Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. I'm joined today by Leo Babauta. Leo is the creator and writer of Zen Habits. He's married with six kids and lives in San Francisco. He's a writer, a runner, and a vegan. Zen Habits is a Time Magazine top 25-rated website dedicated to finding simplicity in the daily chaos of our lives. It's about clearing the clutter so that we can focus on what's important, create something amazing, and find happiness.
Hi, Leo. Thanks for coming on.
Leo: Hi! Yeah, thanks for having me. It's an honor.
Christopher: Tell me, where were you in 2005?
Leo: Yeah. So physically I was on the island of Guam, but in my life I was in this place where I was stuck and struggling to get out of all kinds of bad places that I wasn't happy with -- I wasn't happy with myself -- but I was a smoker, I was deeply in debt, I had bad health habits, sedentary, eating junk food, overweight, surrounded by clutter, stressed out, no time for my wife and kids -- as you know, I have six kids -- and I just didn't know how to make any changes. I tried to quit smoking seven times and kept failing, trying to stick to a diet, tried to start running; none of those things would stick and I didn't know why, and I kept feeling really bad about myself. So that was me in 2005.
Christopher: So how do you start when you've got so much going on? What did you do? Did you just go all-in and try and fix everything at once or did you have a plan? How did it work?
Leo: Yeah, I definitely tried to fix everything at once a lot and that always failed, so I'm like, "Hey, that's not working." So the thing that finally worked for me was deciding just to do one and pour my entire being into that one change. I highly recommend that.
It doesn't really matter what you start with. I actually started with probably the hardest one -- and I don't recommend that -- which was quitting smoking, but I learned a lot from that. Like I said, I was all-in for this one change. That was another mistake that I made was not really committing myself to the changes. I would say, "Oh, I'm going to start running today. It's no problem," and then I wouldn't, and I -- because I was only halfway in really.
So you really have to commit yourself completely, and if you're really committed, you're going to tell everybody about it. So you tell the world and that gives you this public accountability, and if you don't want to tell anybody -- because I made a lot of times where I'm like, "I'm going to quit smoking today, but I'm not going to tell anybody because..." Basically, I was giving myself an out and saying, "If I didn't feel like quitting today, I'll allow myself to smoke." Basically, I was allowing myself this back door.
So don't give yourself a back door. Be all-in, fully committed. Pour yourself into this one change. I highly recommend -- I didn't do it with smoking, but for all my other changes I did one small change. So like with running, I could even run ten minutes but I would go out and run for five minutes. That was something that I couldn't say no to. It was like all I have to do was go out and run for five minutes, and on the days when I really didn't want to run, I was not feeling it, I would tell myself all I had to do was lace up my shoes and get out the door. That was such a small thing that I couldn't say no.
So lower the bar and just make it unobjectionable, you have no objections to that. Once you get going you might do more of it, but really what you want to do is to just make it as small as possible, and then you can't say, "Well, I have no time for it today," or "I have no energy for it today," or "I'm just not feeling like it today," because the change is so small that you can have time for five minutes or two minutes. Those were some of the biggest things is be fully committed, one change at a time, and really small unobjectionable change.
What I learned also from that was that you change gradually. When you really want to change overnight, at least the American way is to say, "I'm going to change everything and it's going to be this quick fix." I don't know how it is where you live. Is that a common thing?
Christopher: Yeah. Absolutely, the culture is the same. It's like some grandiose project which is destined to fail.
Leo: Well, you want it to happen right away. You want to see this amazing change in your life right away. That's perfectly understandable but it just doesn't happen that way. Change happens slowly, gradually, with some gradual progress. Again, I started with five minutes. A year later I ran my first marathon, and I couldn't have done that at all. It was unimaginable when I first started, but I ran a marathon and it took me five hours. It wasn't a fast marathon but it happened. So that showed me the power of gradual change and that's a really important thing. Start really small but then progress gradually.
Christopher: You've raised a couple of interesting points. That was going to be my next question. How do you know if you're committed? I think that's a really important point that you've made, like actually tell someone about it and then you're on the line for it. I wonder -- so what we've been doing, we've been doing some diet and lifestyle coaching with a group of people, and I know that one of them said to me, "I really want you to publish my success story on the website because then I'm on the hook for it, right?"
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Leo: Yeah.
Christopher: "I can't go back. I can't put this 30 pounds back on if it's there on the website," and I thought, "I'd never really thought about that before." But it is. It's like you're then accountable in a way, and I guess that's what commitment is really, isn't it? It's like these little things that make you accountable.
Leo: Yeah. Part of it is that there's a commitment in your mind like, "I'm really going to do this," and if you're taking it seriously, then you're going to prove it to yourself by telling at least one person about it. But if you're really committed, tell a lot of people about it.
The other thing is there's that commitment in your mind, but then there's the accountability for the days when you just don't feel like it. I mean, that's a lousy excuse is not feeling like it, but it works. That excuse keeps us from doing things a lot. So all you've got to do is just overcome that excuse by having some accountability. Having a coach is an amazing thing, but also just an accountability partner or a group, and they'll imagine like --
Let's say you're trying to make a diet change. Imagine there is a picture of what you ate that goes automatically on the Internet and everyone can see it. You would be much more likely to stick to the change instead of just kind of doing it, like if no one could see what you're eating, you might sneak in a doughnut or some ice cream. But if everyone could see it, if you were on CCTV every time you ate, there would be no way that you're going to do some really embarrassing mess out there so you would be much more likely to stick to it. Those kinds of things, they're really powerful when you're trying to make a change.
Christopher: This is funny. You're shedding light on some of the things that I know have been working but I'm not entirely clear why. My wife is a food scientist and one of the things she spends a lot of time doing is reviewing food diaries, which is not a complicated thing. You just give someone a Google Doc spreadsheet and have them write down all the food that they're eating. They think they're doing an amazing job on their diet until someone else -- and it doesn't really even need to be an expert -- just somebody else goes through that and say, "Okay, I'm going to highlight all these things in yellow which is sugar, and look how much yellow there is now on this page," right?
And I'm sure now, having heard you say that, another important part of it is just knowing that someone is looking over your shoulder, and if you do something, you're going to be accountable for that.
Leo: It's really powerful. Actually, in the book that I'm writing that's coming out, I have this game that I'm calling "The Zen Habits Game," and it's got a lot of the ideas that are in the book all put into one game where you do it with a group of other people. Maybe you do it on an online spreadsheet that you're sharing or on a Facebook group or something like that, but you're all doing it together so there's this feeling of togetherness, making positive changes together. You also commit to doing something one week at a time, just a small change, and everyone can see whether you do it or not. So there's some accountability there and I think that's a powerful way to make change.
And then you can also throw some fun things into it, like have some kind of embarrassing consequence that's fun, that's not going to hurt you, like have your friends throw a pie in your face if you don't stick to it for a week or something like that.
Christopher: That's really good.
Leo: Yeah. I mean, get a video of it and put that on the Internet, and so that -- yeah, you don't want the pie in your face. The idea is not to have a stick hitting you. It's more like, "Well, on those days when I just don't feel like doing it, I'm going to think about that pie in my face. And I'm not going to want to embarrass myself so I'll probably just do it. It's not that hard."
So that's the idea of that accountability and the commitment and group change. It's a really powerful way to make changes and stick to things when we often don't feel like doing it.
Christopher: Yeah, it's interesting the way that the Internet has come along and changed everything in that respect, too. Before, just some of the things we've been taking about just never would have been possible, which are now not that difficult at all.
Leo: One of the things I did when I quit smoking for that first change was I joined an online smoking cessation forum where you go in and introduce yourself and you join this community of people who are going through the same things that you are going through, because when you're doing a change like quitting smoking, often you're doing it alone, and that feels lonely and hard and difficult.
But if you do it with other people and you see that they're going through the same things and yet they can still stick to it even though they're struggling, that's inspiring. It gives you a little bit more certainty, overcomes that self-doubt, and you can ask them question like, "How did you do it?" and they can tell you. That was impossible 20 to 30 years ago. That's, I think, an amazing thing that we're living in this age.
Christopher: It is, yes. So talk to me about waking up early. This is something that's popped up in front of me a couple of times. Even this week, I was talking to a guy called Hal Elrod earlier this week and he has a book called "The Miracle Morning," and the idea is --
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It's interesting that the formula, the algorithm is a whole bunch of things that everybody has heard of, like reading and meditating and being thankful, and just breathing practices and stuff. But it seems there's something special about waking up and starting your day with these practices rather than just diving straight into your inbox that's got 75 emails from last night. So talk to me about waking up early, and how did that become important to you?
Leo: Yeah. I mean, I have to start by saying everyone's different. Some people are not going to do well in the morning. I found that people will try it and they struggle with it so much and they just hate it. I definitely can wake up grumpy and tired and that's not so pleasant, but what I found -- actually, the reason I did it was I wanted to have some time for my writing and also marathon training when I first started that, and I have a family and I have a job. It's like there's so much going on during the day that I just needed to find the space where I can do the writing and the running, and the only time I could think of doing that was early morning.
So I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to wake up early and start doing that," and it was an amazing thing because I actually started to enjoy that quiet time in the morning before everything turned to chaos and all of the things are coming in and I got so busy. I enjoyed that little quiet space in my life for writing, reading, meditating, running, those kinds of things.
I think we're so busy and there's so many things going that it's hard to find that space later in the day. You say, "Well, I'm going to go running after work," but then one thing after the other comes and pretty soon you're too busy to do it, and so you push it out to the next day and then the next day. But if you do it first before everything else comes up, you're less likely to push it back.
And something you can do is give yourself a rule. If you wanted to, let's say, write, you could say, "I'm going to wake up. I'm going to make my cup of tea and enjoy that as I start writing, but I'm not going to allow myself to check email until after I've done my writing quota for the day." If you set yourself a rule like that and again have some public accountability for that rule, you might really want to go check your email but you've got to get your writing done first, and that's a really effective way to get the writing done or the meditation or whatever it is you want to do that's most important to you right now.
Christopher: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, and I've seen it in myself as well. It's like as soon as -- I mean, I learned this from someone else, but I guess everybody learned everything from somebody -- that the moment I look at my inbox, I'm on someone else's schedule, right? So any other task that I had maybe lined up for that day, then -- it's all on somebody else's schedule.
Leo: Yeah, it's what their request -- what's important to them now has become important to you, right?
Christopher: I wanted to know about your diet as well, and this interests me in particular because that's turned out to be extremely important to me. I have tons of food sensitivities so I'm like the canary in the mine that has dropped dead the moment I get exposed to anything. Restaurants are a nightmare for me --
Leo: Oh, boy.
Christopher: -- for this reason. I'm pretty sure I'm celiac. I'm at least very sensitive to gluten. I tried becoming a vegetarian and it was mostly for reasons related to climate change. I thought it was the one thing that I could do that was a meaningful contribution, and I'm not sure about that now so much. When I look at the evidence again, I'm not even really sure whether that's right or wrong now.
But one thing I do know for sure is that it didn't help with my health. I'm pretty sure it got worse when I tried to be a vegetarian. So tell me about that. How does that work and why did you choose vegetarianism?
Leo: Sure. Well, I did start it for health reasons. Again, I was in a really bad place. I ate a lot of junk and so I thought, "Well, I know vegetables are good for you, so maybe if I eat more of those..." And I know vegetarians, basically that's all they eat. So that was my idea when I started.
So I did it. Actually, it turned out to be a really healthy change for me because I was eating less of the junk and processed food and more of the home-cooked, vegetable type-based dishes. So it was a positive change for me. You might have already had that in your life where you're eating less processed stuff because of your diet, and so switching to vegan might have meant switching to more processed foods. I don't know. So that might have been one thing.
Another thing about veganism, just to let you know, is there are ways to be healthy on a vegan diet, but some people, they experience worse health. I think a lot of people do better on vegan diet health-wise from junk food diets, but some people have worse health because of certain things like vitamin B12 or vitamin D, things like that, and if you don't get enough of those things, especially vitamin D, you're going to feel horrible. So you have to be more aware of that as a vegan.
But anyway, going back to your original question, I started for health and it was a positive improvement to my health, but the more I learned about these issues, the more it became about compassion for animals. So that's why I eventually went fully vegan. It was a gradual transition but it was because I really started to care about that. And there was, of course, the environmental impact kind of thing too and for me that's always been more of a bonus. If that's true, then I think that's awesome, but really I'm doing it because I care about another living being.
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So that's really my big motivator, and I found that people who started to care about that stick with the vegan diet for longer, because for health reasons, there's a lot of diets you can do and be healthy. For environmental reasons, that's not quite -- it's hard to be convinced of it and sometimes it doesn't feel that important, but for reasons of compassion, I think that's been a much bigger motivator for me and for a lot of other people who stick with it.
Christopher: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, certainly -- I gave that example of gluten and it's definitely possible to be not very healthy eating gluten-free versions of the same old crap that you've always been eating, right? That definitely does happen. I think the same is true of veganism, too. You can get vegan junk food and it's just -- like anything that's processed and really not very nutrient-dense is going to be a problem.
So how do you get around some -- there's some glaring things to me when I look at the vegan diet, like in particular vitamin B12. Plants just don't produce it at all and yet it plays an extremely important role in the human body. So how do you get around that? Where do you get your vitamin B12 from?
Leo: Well, I have things like soy milk and things like that that are enriched with it so it's not really that hard. They're convenience foods but I find that they fit well into my healthier diet, which is tons of whole foods. So I can have some soy milk and it's not a problem and it's enriched, but you can also take -- it's not that hard -- you can find plant sources of B12 that are concentrated into a vitamin, and they actually come from -- B12 isn't produced by animals either. They get it from -- I think it's like a bacteria or something like that that produces it that animals eat, and then we eat the animal products and that gives us the B12. But you can get it straight from the bacteria that produce it.
So those are the little things that you start to become aware of, but what happens is -- what I found as a vegan is that after a while, that becomes a non-issue. So it's something in the beginning that you really read up on and you figure out, but then after a while you just don't think about it. I'm sure it's the same as you with gluten, like maybe in the beginning it was really hard to find gluten-free things, but after a while you just know what works and what doesn't and you just buy those things or make those dishes and it becomes really easy.
So that's what I found for me is that in veganism there is an initial hurdle, but I think after a while it just becomes routine and I don't even think about it anymore.
Christopher: Yeah, that is an excellent -- it's totally stolen from -- there's a woman called the "Paleo Mom," Sarah Ballantyne, whose Autoimmune Protocol turned out to be instrumental to me recovering my health, and she has a saying which is, "It's only difficult until it's routine," which I think is what you're saying. So you've got all these things that you're trying to eliminate from your diet and at first it's quite traumatic -- like you said, how are you going to eliminate that stuff? -- then once you do, you settle into a routine and it's exactly that. You never have to think about it ever again.
Leo: Right. I also just wanted to -- one last thing about veganism is I don't want to push it on anyone else or say this is the one healthy or the one diet that everyone should do. I know for people like yourself, for example, what you're doing is probably the best thing for you and I'm not going to say that you should do my way. For me, this is what I found to be not only healthy but good for the environment and compassionate and it just feels right to me. So I think everyone should try and find the diet that feels right to them.
Christopher: Yeah. I mean, I'm completely goal-orientated so that's what drives me. If you get results doing something, then it's very, very difficult to argue that. But, yeah, I probably do spend a little bit more time than you do trying to push people into not eating grains and -- yes.
Leo: And I think you can be healthy eating actually any food. You could be healthy eating tons of meat but, I mean, it just depends on how you do it. So I think you can be healthy eating grains, just probably to start an argument with you.
Christopher: Yeah. No, I think -- and then another thing that's really important here is it's not just about the food, right? It's about everything else that's going on. So if you have everything else really well-organized and you manage your stress appropriately, and you're getting enough sleep and exercise, and all these other things that we know to be important, then that gives you much more wiggle room to do what you want with your diet, I think. I think that's true of any one area. You'll probably exercise less if you were eating squeaky clean.
But being organized, it turns out that that's been really important for you, and it's something that interests me greatly because being a small business owner, I have to wear many hats and it's very easy to get disorganized. So tell me about that. How did you manage to get your life organized?
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Leo: Yeah. Well, my main driving principle is to simplify before organizing, because I definitely was greatly disorganized and it became stressful for me and also led to financial problems because I wasn't paying my bills on time, things like that. So organization has helped me a lot, but it's again just like the diet where you start in the beginning and it's a big deal, and then after a while it just becomes routine. So I don't think about it too much anymore. That's why I don't write about it as much anymore.
But in the beginning, what happened is instead of -- let's say you had a room full of, let's just say, documents. There's piles and piles of documents. Creating a filing system for that, an organizational system, would be really hard. But what if you decided to go through those documents and toss out 90% of them because they weren't that important? Now, you have a smaller stack that you can easily organize. You might not even need to organize it too much because it's pretty simple.
So that's what I found is organizing information and all the things in your life is way simpler once you've gotten rid of all the unnecessary stuff. Once you've whittled it down to that, then it's easier to figure out where everything belongs and things like that.
But the other principle that I do -- and I didn't make up any of this stuff so I'm just going to steal it -- is to have a place for everything, and I call them a "home." So once you've simplified, now take everything that's left and put it -- if it's important enough to be in your life, it's important enough to have a place, and that could be information.
So every time you get some new -- stuff for your taxes should go into one folder or label in Gmail or something like that. If it's books, you should have a place for your books. Don't just leave them lying all around because if they're important enough to be in your life and take up some mental space and physical space, then find a place for them so that you always know where it goes and you always know where it will be.
So that takes a little bit of habit change, like putting something back in that space is going to take some time to get used to it, but after a while it just becomes, again, routine. So you just start putting things back in that place and if it's not there, you start to say, "Okay, I need to remember to put it back there," and it becomes really easy. So simplify, and then find a place. Those are my main organizational guiding principles.
Christopher: Yeah, that's a great one. Another one I learned from -- there's a guy called Ari Meisel that has a website, "Less Doing" -- I learned from him was the use of virtual assistants. So there's this website I've been using called "Fancy Hands" that you might have heard of.
Leo: Oh, yeah.
Christopher: Yeah. So the thing that I thought was most instructive with that, was most useful with that is actually getting to the point where you write something down. So I have some kind of monotonous task that I perform. It doesn't take me very long but I do it frequently, and so it ends up taking up a lot of time just through the amount of times I do it, and the first thing you have to do is not like just ask somebody else to do it. It's to look at the process, write it down. I'm a computer programmer. So you almost write the pseudocodes for --
Leo: Right. You find an algorithm.
Christopher: Yeah, exactly, right, the algorithm for that task, and then once you've written it down, it's a useful exercise. You see how glaringly inefficient it is. So the first task is to make it as if like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, that step and that step, that doesn't need to happen at all," and yet you've been doing it every day for the last however many months, and only then once you've organized it and made it efficient, you try then handing it off to someone else. So it's just kind of "I never would have done that task." It's like, "Why would I have done that if I wasn't going to pass it on to someone else?" I think that's a useful exercise.
Leo: Yeah. Well, as a programmer, I wonder if you wish your life were more scriptable. I mean, you just script everything and just automate your entire life.
Christopher: Well, it's funny how much of it is now. There's IFTTT, the website that hooks things up. It's amazing, like you think, "Oh, what the heck is this?" Just go to this website and look at the list of recipes they have there, things that can be done. If you spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get your photographs from Instagram into Google Drive, then I can assure you that can be done without you having to do anything at all.
Leo: I think the question then becomes, "How much time are we going to spend thinking about organizing ourselves and automating everything?" And there's diminishing returns and you have to figure out whether this is worth thinking about that long.
Christopher: Yeah, if it's an investment worthwhile, exactly.
Leo: Right, right.
Christopher: "How often is this going to happen? Is it something I spend a lot of time on or is it not?" In which case maybe you should just keep doing it manually.
Leo: Yeah.
Christopher: So tell me about the progression of your writing. I mean, the blog is obviously a huge and wonderful resource. It's a very good-looking blog as well, Zenhabits.net if you haven't already been there.
Leo: Thank you.
Christopher: But now you got to the point where you're writing books. You've written a novel in the past, I know, and you've got a new book coming out. So what happens with the productivity of your writing over this period?
Leo: Yeah, I've gone really productive, actually. You're talking about just in the last year?
Christopher: Well, I'm talking about since 2005 even.
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Leo: Oh, yeah. Yeah, this has been quite a journey for me as a writer. Blogging has been transformative. I used to actually write for magazines and newspapers so I've always been a writer, but there were lots of time when I would just be in this huge slump where I wasn't writing at all.
Blogging was transformative for me because now I had an audience that -- every time I publish, there would be some comments, or now there would be tweets. So you get this instant feedback, and you know that after a while you have an audience that's following you and waiting for your next thing. So I'm now really motivated to get up and write several times a week. And so that's fairly big.
Now, I also have a membership program where I'm coaching people and I have several thousand people there, and --
Christopher: Oh, wow!
Leo: Yeah, it's amazing, and so now they're waiting for me to write my latest article. So when you have people waiting on you and who you think is going to benefit from this writing, that's truly motivating, and so it can overcome procrastination incredibly.
And there are times like now when I'm trying to write a book -- and I'm on my last chapter today so it's an amazing accomplishment -- but it's been definitely a struggle because I have a family, I want to work out and cook my own food, and then I also have the blog to write and this program to write articles for, and there's all of the other things in life. So how do you carve out the time for writing a book? And when --
Christopher: You just put it on your to-do list. Just put in the to-do list "write the book" and it will get done. It's as simple as that.
Leo: Okay! Well, you have the solution. I could tell you one thing, though. Everything else starts to go on top of that item on the to-do list when you're not really certain about what you're doing. Like if the book brings up a lot of uncertainty in you -- which if it's a good book, it probably will -- then that item starts to just unconsciously slip down on your priority list and you're like, "Oh, I've got to do this first," and pretty soon you're not even writing. That actually has been a struggle for me so I found various ways to overcome that this year, but all of them have been useful because I put them in the book itself.
So one thing I did that's really interesting in writing this book is I had a group of alpha testers -- you're a programmer so you know about --
Christopher: Yeah, of course.
Leo: -- beta testing and alpha testing. So I had a group of ten people who I was writing the earlier version of this book for, but instead of writing it in solitude in an echo chamber with no one giving me any feedback until the book is published, I now wrote for them on a regular basis, daily or every other day.
And then I got feedback from them instantly, like they would journal about it and tell me about how it was working out and what they didn't understand, where the holes were, and that was so useful. Just like in software development, if you can get feedback as you're developing, the final product is going to be way better and you're going to be iterating way faster.
So that's really what the process of the book was, it's like a software development process, and that has been tremendously useful and motivating for me as a write because there were people who were waiting for me to write each chapter.
Christopher: Okay, I've got to stop you right now because I'm totally sold on that idea. It's brilliant. Like the idea of -- and I see there's certain types of programming language that encourages this same idea. In the old days, I used to use this programming language called C or C++ and the idea was you write this big, long program and then you press the "compile" button, and then ten minutes later it comes back with this program, and then you run it and it just core dumps, it doesn't work, and so you have to go back to the drawing board sometimes. Now, I use a programming language called Python which has a little command prompt and you can actually --
Leo: Mm-hmm. I'm learning that, by the way.
Christopher: Oh, cool! Yeah, so you can actually get immediate feedback, like I can write -- I've got a Python prompt sat right in front of me here. I use it as a calculator and I write little snippets of code and I see how it works, and it's very much more the iterative process that you've described with writing the book. I would really love that.
So that's one of my biggest problems right now is I have all this stuff in my head, experience I've had with working with other people about lab tests and diets that work and practices in people's lives that work, and so I have tons and tons of ideas for things that I could be writing but I don't have a following. So if I write an article, maybe a hundred people are going to read it. So there's definitely not, I don't think, a following like yours.
So how did you build that following? How did you get to the point where you could have beta testers looking at your writing?
Leo: Yeah. Well, I mean, you only need one or two if you want to build your interactive shell. You need just one or two people to give you feedback, but five would be great. If you have a hundred, you could probably find one or two in there who are willing to go through a coaching program with you, right?
But to your question of how to build an audience, I think in some ways I'm lucky. In other ways, I've been honing my writing craft for years. I've been a writer for more than 20 years. I wrote for newspapers and that really helped. That was a great honing process.
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But in other ways, I was lucky in that I shared what worked for me and my story of change and all these tips, but the message that I was trying to send to people was of knowing the possibility of change and of small gradual changes but also of simplifying your life and finding mindfulness. When I wrote it, I had no idea if anyone would care about any of that stuff, and it turned out there were a lot of people online who were craving that simplicity in their lives.
So my message resonated with a large group of people who weren't in my daily life. I didn't think anyone cared about that stuff. I was simplifying my life and no one else around me thought that was important, but online I found people who that resonated with greatly and it turns out that's a big need. So if you can tap into something like that where people are like, "Ah, I need this in my life, and here is someone who's actually done it and is going to show me how to do it," that was huge for me and that was totally accidental.
So I can't give you a formula, an algorithm for growing an audience that way, but if you can find that, that is amazing.
Christopher: It seems like another one of those things where the strongest just gets stronger. Do you know what I mean? So I see that obviously you had a talent and a joy in writing and then that built this audience that only made you stronger. I'm a bike racer and you see it in bike racing as well that the people that have the most talent, they quite often win races, and so they don't have to try as hard in order to win that race.
So the guy that's coming fourth or fifth or sixth, they're busting their balls trying to win this race and they're not achieving what they want, and so they go out and train even harder and make themselves even more tired in some instances for the race, and so they just -- yeah, the strong gets stronger and the weaker just get weaker.
Leo: So do you win those races that you're racing?
Christopher: I used to before I upgraded to pro. I was then like an age-group racer and I used to win those ones, the Cat 1 races. I used to win those quite easily. Then I upgraded and the best I can hope for now is midpack.
Leo: So what motivates you to keep racing even if you're not winning?
Christopher: That's a very good question, and I don't feel like I've done as much racing this year since I upgraded. It's a really good point, actually. I haven't done as much racing and I've been far more excited about helping other people achieve some of what I've enjoyed with my health over the last couple of years than I have about going and doing a race, especially as I've since realized that --
We both talked about endurance exercises, cycling for me, running for you, and I know now that repetitive cardio is perhaps not the best thing that you can do for your health. Especially as we get older, it seems like retaining muscle mass is probably the most important indicator when it comes to health and longevity. So really just some occasional sprinting and lifting heavy things, and so a more minimalist approach to exercises is probably going to be beneficial but -- like running is better than sitting on the couch, watching the TV and -- I'm sure you've got to the point now where you just love it, and perhaps you're not just doing it because you think it's going to make you healthy but because you love it, and I think that's a really good reason to do something.
Leo: Well, the reason I ask that question about what motivates you is because if you're a blogger, let's say you're starting out, and maybe people like me who are successful are going to get more successful, the strong gets stronger, but the people who are just starting out, they shouldn't be -- if they try and motivate themselves by being a successful blog, that's like trying to motivate yourself going out to a race and saying, "I'm only going to be motivated if I win."
That shouldn't be your motivation because that's not going to work. You're going to not be a successful blog, especially not in the beginning, and you'll be discouraged if that was your motivation and you'll quit. So the people who succeed are the people who stick with it for a long time, and I didn't succeed right away. It came to me fairly quickly, I have to admit, but my real successes come because I keep doing it.
So what I would tell people who are writing or blogging or doing anything really is find other motivation than this huge success, this being one of the best. Be motivated by going out there and dealing with other people. Be motivated by helping even just one person. Be motivated by enjoying the activity itself, and blogging can be that.
Blogging can be something where you're just reaching a small group of people but people who care about what you're doing, and that's amazing! Blogging can be just a way for you to share the changes that you're going through, to distill those things that you've been learning into something that you can share with people, maybe force you to reflect on what you've been going through and then to draw learning from that. Those are all great things you can do even if you don't get 10,000 readers.
So yeah, I encourage people to do that, but if you want the secrets of my growth, I'll give you a couple of those.
Christopher: Okay.
Leo: Okay. So obviously, tapping into something that people wanted was really great. Another one was I always put my readers first, and so I realized when I had a bunch of ads and other kinds of things trying to meet my goals, which was to make some money or to get a lot of readers, that was not the goal of the reader who was coming to the site. So I started putting them first.
[0:35:10]
You said my site is beautiful, thank you, but really what it is, it's a lack of all the things that would serve my goals as a writer and it's only putting the readers' goal first, which is that they come here to read something that's going to be useful to them. So they go to this site and there's nothing that gets in their way of reading that article.
So that's their goal. Putting them first is my most important driving principle, and that means I don't market to them too much, I don't push my products on them, I don't try and do a pop-up ad or something like that that gets in the way.
Christopher: You've got to see this website. So I'm looking at this webpage now. I have to describe it. So it's black and white is the best way to describe it, and there's one column in the center of the page which is just the -- it's the exact same width -- I've got quite a nice, big monitor here. I don't know what it looks like on a small screen, but it's exactly the same width as you'd expect to see a book. So the length of one line of text is probably this length for a reason. I've been on this page for more than 17 seconds now and I haven't seen one of those OptinMonster pop-ups coming that's going to demand my email address or leave.
Leo: I will never do one of those. That's my promise to all of you guys. It's meant to be the optimal reading experience. That's how I've designed it. I designed that myself and I'm not a great designer, but I am a reader and how would I want to read -- when I go to another site, I can see all the things that irritate me as a reader, and so I'm like, "I'm not doing any of that. I want to be the perfect reading experience," because that's my main goal is for people to read this and then find something useful in it and go put it into practice. If I can do that, they've succeeded and then I succeed. So I line my goals with my readers and I put theirs first. So that's one thing.
And then another thing I did once I really put myself into being as useful as possible for these readers is I started spreading the word through guest posting. So that was my dirty secret is that I wrote a ton of guest posts. I mean, if you can reach someone else's audience, they might only have -- if you have a hundred readers, they might have 500, but that's still amazing. That's 500 people who maybe have never seen you before, and now you have to write a post for them which is way better than putting an ad on that blog. This is a better ad for how useful and good you are and how genuine you are, and how you really care about helping people. Once they read that, then they'll go to your blog and say, "Oh, I want more of that."
So I did a ton of guest posts. The first year that I did it, it really helped me grow. I also got help on social media, things like that, so that really helped, but it wouldn't have helped if I hadn't done the guest posts first. Again, focus on the reader and being as useful as possible for them.
So one thing I did for my readers is I think, "What are their problems?" First, I assumed that their problems are mine, so I would look at all my problems and delve into what I did in the beginning, what problems that I faced. So there's the problem of changing habits, but there are lots of other problems like, "What kind of running shoes do you wear?" "What time do you go running?" and, "Do I have to eat something before that?"
So there's all these little problems that go with the bigger problem and if I can solve as many of those as possible, then I'm really useful, and so --
Christopher: Right. Can I interrupt you there? How did you identify somebody else's problems? This is an interesting question.
Leo: Right. So first, again I assumed that my problems were theirs, and a lot of times that's really true. But then, the other thing I did was I asked them. I'm like, "Well, what problems have you faced?" and I did do the comments. I don't have comments now but I did then. Sometimes I would do question-and-answer kinds of things. I would also do coaching where I would figure out what people's problems are through that. So all of these were ways for me to figure out what their problems were, and then I would try and figure out how to solve those.
Christopher: Okay. That's a really important point here. So I've got comments on our blog as well and the main reason is I just don't have time to manage them. I just can't do that, but --
Leo: Right, right. You could do surveys, so just post it at the bottom of one of your blog posts. "Here's a survey. I would love it if you took two minutes to answer it." You could ask people on Twitter. Again, coaching is an amazing thing. If you can just get one person and start coaching them through a change, you can figure out what their problems are, and you record all of those things.
If people email you -- that's another thing is they often email with questions -- each one of those questions is a great blog post. So I love when people email me. I make it hard for them to do it but when they do, those are gold because each one of those questions is something that -- it's not just unique to this one reader. It's probably at least 20% of my readers have that same problem.
Christopher: Yeah, that's a really good idea actually, and I have tons of questions. So why -- yeah, I mean, why have I never thought about this before? I have all these ideas for things I'd like to write about but they're not really related to the questions that people are asking me at all. There's this test that we run, it's an organic acid test, and it can tell you how well you're utilizing fat as fuel, and that for me is an amazing thing and I want to write about it.
[0:40:09]
Leo: Oh, I'd love to read that.
Christopher: But how many people have really asked me that question? Like, "Oh, which organic acid should I be looking at?" And I'm like nobody's asked me that question. It's just purely my own kind of thing.
Leo: Yeah. You need an app. Well, that's what you need -- if you're a programmer, create an app that tells me if I'm burning fat right now or not. I want to -- then it turns into a game. I want to increase my fat burning percentage throughout the day. I would love that. I would constantly be burning fat.
Christopher: It's something I'd have to think carefully about, and it's very -- so we've been doing some quite complicated lab tests and that's not something that you could do all the time. It's a $400 urine test in this instance, so I'm thinking -- I mean, certainly we know in terms of exercise physiology that for most people, there's a point at which if they exercise any more intensely they'll stop using fat, of which you have lots, and start using sugar, which you don't have so very much. So definitely, you could maybe calculate a way, like even with heart rate even, that could be done. Maybe that's something I should think about.
Leo: Right, and with the devices becoming more and more like having the data, the metrics, yeah, I think that's going to be the wave of the future of health and fitness, right?
Christopher: Yeah, for sure. It's a really exciting place to be in, I think, right now. Some of the tests that I'm doing now have been around for 15 years and haven't really changed much and require a sample of urine. I'm just wondering what it's going to be -- I'm going to look back at this time in five or ten years and think, "I can't believe that we started to do a blood draw for this," or "I can't believe that there were these three different tests just to get these 12 different markers. That's ridiculous! Now, you get..." I'm guessing, but --
Leo: Well, what will happen is if your phone is in your pocket while you go to the restroom, it'll pick up a little urine sample as you use the restroom.
Christopher: It can be done now. It's like the best way to think of it is there's these exhaust fumes that are in your urine, and there's these cellular processes, cellular metabolism that goes on inside your body and these organic acids are like the fumes from that cellular metabolism. By measuring them, you have this surrogate marker that tells you how well the cellular metabolism is working, and so you can make decisions on supplementation and diet and lifestyle changes and stuff based off of these surrogate markers. It's kind of complicated and fun.
But yeah, you're right. It's like something -- at the moment, you have to send that sample into the lab, and in five to ten years' time then maybe you can just dip some paper or dip a probe in it or something and then your phone will tell you exactly what's going on.
Leo: I can't wait.
Christopher: So tell me, what can I expect from the book then that I'm not seeing on the website already? Is the book just a collection of your blog posts or is it something different?
Leo: No, no. I wrote this book from scratch probably three times.
Christopher: Oh, wow!
Leo: I tossed out several versions of the book.
Christopher: How many words are we talking about here that you tossed out at any one time?
Leo: My last version before this one was like nearly 50,000 words.
Christopher: Wow!
Leo: And I decided it was too grandiose and philosophical, and I needed something that was going to be more practical -- because that's what people are looking for -- but it helps them learn the philosophy as they start implementing a change.
So the beginning of the book or the meat of the book is I challenge you to make one small change as you read this book, and so each chapter is going to teach you one new thing about making a change and there's a mission at the end of each chapter. So through the course of this book, you're going to make this change but learn about dealing with change and learn about resistance and procrastination and all kinds of other things that we face as we make a change.
And then what happens is at the end of the book, I show you that you can take all of the things that we learned about these ideals in our head and about our mind that complains about discomfort, all of these things we learn throughout the course of making this change, we can apply them to other problems we face, other things we struggle with. So if you are --
Christopher: Well, I've just been doing it for the last half-an-hour, like everything you said I'm like, "Wow! Yeah, I could do that." Yeah, totally. Sorry, carry on.
Leo: So if you struggle with not only habit change but you're struggling with a major life change, whether it's losing your job or moving to a new place or going to school -- these are major changes that we all struggle with -- this method will help you deal with that change. If you struggle with illness, if you struggle with a family member who has an illness, if you struggle with loss of a loved one, all of these are really hard things to deal with and this method which I really have stolen from Zen Buddhism, the method will help you deal with that.
So I've distilled what I think are the most useful things from Zen Buddhism, and it's just really practical stuff not meant to be any New Age kind of thing, which I'm not against New Age, but it's really practical steps for how to deal with these struggles in our lives. So that's really what the book is and I think at the end of it, it also talks about our happiness with ourselves, which is something that stops a lot of people.
[0:45:11]
Christopher: That's awesome. I was going to ask you about that actually, the connection with Zen Buddhism. I think I was a bit confused at first what the connection was. Can you tell me what it is?
Leo: With the book or with me? Or --
Christopher: Or with -- I mean, is it just -- the name is the same. Do you know what I mean? Like this word "Zen" appears in both of these things but semantically they're completely different, or is that there's something of Zen Buddhism then in the website, in the book?
Leo: Right. So when I started Zen Habits, I basically was trying to come up with a name that encapsulated what was important to me at the time. I was learning about mindfulness, I read a few books on Zen, and this really captures an image of what I want to be about. It wasn't what I was about at the time. So I have to say I was a little bit disingenuous because I didn't think the blog was going to be huge, and it became huge and then everyone was like, "Well, you're not a Zen priest or anything," so I felt a little bit of a fraud.
In the course of the last seven years since starting the blog, I have learned more about Buddhism in general and Zen in particular. I've studied with some Zen Buddhists, taught some classes with a friend of mine who's a Zen priest, and read more books and have meditated way more, and now -- I can't say I'm a Zen Buddhist but I have found a lot of useful things and it has informed a lot of my writings. So not everything I write about relates to Zen, but some of the best things that I've learned do come from Zen and from Buddhism in general.
I'm not a Zen Buddhist. I lot of the things I write about or that I talk about are really useful and they inform my life, and so I -- I think there's a lot to be said, but one of the problems with Zen Buddhism is you go into a Zen hall -- I don't know if you guys have ever done this but if you ever have, it's really off-putting. You go in and you don't know what to do. There's all this chanting and they're all wearing robes, and you feel out of place. And that's difficult, and it's strange, and it's Eastern and mystical, and there's a lot of chanting of all these weird things. So to me, that masks all the really useful stuff that's in there. So I found --
Christopher: Sorry. It's just suddenly the penny dropped there. It's like a little bit of a delayed reaction, but it is quite funny.
Leo: Yeah. No, it is, because there's so much useful stuff but people are never going to find it because they're never going to do that. So I'm trying to pull all these useful stuff, and I've talked to my friend who's the head of the San Francisco Zen Center. I'm like, "You guys have to show people how awesome this stuff is." Just simple things like mindfulness, obviously, but also just dealing with change and the nature of life as change and the suffering that we deal with because of this change, suffering in a Buddhist sense in that everything we -- all the anger and frustration and stress is a form of suffering.
So anyway, how to deal with all that stuff is basically the question of how to deal with life, and that's really useful. I mean, there are some key lessons there. I'm not saying they have all the answers to life, but there are almost all of them. So it's good stuff, and so I'm stealing that and putting it into the book called "Zen Habits." This time it's a more purposeful title. The book is called "Zen Habits" but unlike the blog, it's not an accident. It's more of a distillation of things I've learned about habits but also what I've learned from Zen Buddhism.
Christopher: That's pretty cool. I think that's the important task actually, to have somebody distill something down, just start with the bits that are useful. I don't want to learn the hard way. That sucks.
Leo: Maybe because you have to study for years to learn the key Buddhist concepts, and they don't -- like if you read a Zen book, they're so Zen's about. They'll be like, "Oh, yeah, Zen's about this and that," but they're not going to tell you. They shroud it in mystery and I'm like, "But why? It's so great!" So I try to unshroud it and bring it to the masses, and I think it'll be massively useful.
Hey, but I have one other thing before -- I don't know if you're going to wrap it up, but I have this other idea in the book that I stole from programming.
Christopher: Cool.
Leo: I don't know how much you -- I mean, obviously, you know about agile programming. Have you heard of a method called Scrum?
Christopher: I haven't. No, I don't know anything about that.
Leo: So basically, Scrum and agile programming are related but there's this idea of Scrum where it's for group programming where you're working on a project. It goes against the Microsoft model where you have a long timeline of plans, a cascading timeline of all these things of how the project is going to go.
[0:49:55]
Instead, you plan one week at a time, one sprint at a time. You have a plan for this week, you say what you're going to do and what you're going to produce and then you execute it, and at the end of the week you do a review and you say, "How did we do? Did we do all the things we said we're going to do? What was the output and what got in the way?" And the most important thing is what got in the way. So those are the obstacles. You're going to find the solutions and you're going to put them into the plan for next week. So for the next sprint, your plan has now been altered to accommodate the obstacles you had in the first week.
So if you do this every week, one week at a time, every week you're going to get better and better, and this will now be more accommodating to the reality of the project or your life and your plan will evolve -- because in the beginning, when you make a plan, it's just this fantasy. You have no idea if this is going to work or not and what you're going to face, but as you go, the plan evolves to be suited to the reality that you're in.
What I found in habits is we come up with this idea of how we're going to create a habit, and it's like, "Oh, yeah, I'm going to be an amazing cyclist." "Oh, I'm going to be a meditator," and that sounds great, but when you start executing it, there's all these things that get in the way. "I'm too busy, or I'm tired in the morning, or I face resistance, or I just don't feel like it some days and my mind tells me not to." So there's all these obstacles, and the plan that you had at the beginning did not accommodate those obstacles. You did not plan for them because you didn't know they were there until you started doing it.
And so I have this --
Christopher: I didn't know what I wanted until it was done.
Leo: Well, you don't know what's going to get in the way, and so the idea with the Scrum method is that you're going to accelerate your output over time because you're removing the obstacles and your plan adjusts to remove those obstacles. So over time, with Scrum as a programming thing, you'll get better as a team. Your team is going to start kicking ass after a month or two of using this thing because you're going to get better and better at what you do. It's kind of the Kaizen method for manufacturing but applied to programming.
So I take that and steal it and put it to habits where you make a habit plan in the beginning, but a week later you see, "How many days did I do it? What got in the way?" and you adjust your plan based on those obstacles, and the second week you're going to be better because your plan is better, and the third week you're going to be even better, and by the time you can do a month of this, you're going to be amazing at this habit and your plan is going to be adjusted to the reality of your life and you as a person, which is different than what I am.
This is how you individualize the habit plan. I can't make a plan that's going to work for every single person, but you can if you evolve it over time. Things need to evolve in order to survive, and the mistake we make is that we say, "Well, this is the habit plan and it's perfect and I'm going to do it," and then you fail, so you die. You don't evolve. You say, "Well, I sucked and I'm not going to do it." But the people who survive are the people who adapt, and so they become good at habits because they have adapted their habit plan basically, sometimes unconsciously, but they've adapted it to the reality of their circumstances.
Christopher: Okay. So what else comes with -- do you have any support framework that goes with the book? I'm thinking -- I listened to Dan Pardi, in particular, talk about how it might not be enough just to try and educate people with things like podcasts, for example, like you need to actually provide them maybe with some software or something else that can actually get them involved. So is there anything else that you have to offer besides the book? I know it's asking quite a lot, but I thought I'd ask anyway.
Leo: No, no, no, that's a great question. So in the Kickstarter, I have several levels. The higher levels actually do come with some support. I have one where I allow you to do a webinar where you can ask me questions. I have another one where I'm actually going to coach people. That's a quite high level of paying, but I coach people for three months and then we have an event at the end of it.
But I also have a program that's separate from the book. It's called the "Sea Change" program where there's accountability of teams that you can have on these forums, and I give live webinars each month and write articles. So the program can go hand-in-hand with the book, but if you don't want to pay for any of that stuff and you just want the book and you want it to work, there's another thing I put into the book which is called "The Zen Habits Game," and so it turns making a habit into a game, a social game.
So if you can get a bunch of friends or find people online to do this game with you, you're going to do it as a group, you're going to commit to one habit change and you're going to do the habit sprints, and you're going to score your habit sprint each week. The idea is to make your score better and better, and just because you're doing it with other people, you're going to be motivated to get that score up and to hold yourself accountable, and there's also things again like embarrassing consequences that you can set for yourself. So you turn the thing into a group game and you're making changes with other people, and again, that's an amazingly powerful thing.
You can create your own support if you don't want to pay a bunch of extra things for my support.
[0:55:07]
Christopher: No, no, I think it's an amazing thing. So is the Kickstarter live yet?
Leo: They're probably live when -- on times people are listening to this. It's going live on November 17th at noon.
Christopher: Oh, yeah, it will.
Leo: Yeah. So by the time you're listening to it, you can go to the Kickstarter. Find it on my site, Zenhabits.net, or the book website which is Zenhabitsbook.com and that will direct you to where to go for the Kickstarter. But it's a 30-day Kickstarter, so I hope people hear this before then and back this because it's really the only way that I'm selling the book is through this Kickstarter campaign, and that's really because I'm trying to cut out all the intermediaries and just take it straight to the readers. I'm hoping people will back it because I think it's a worthy project.
Christopher: I would definitely be backing it.
Leo: Awesome!
Christopher: Yeah, I will put links in the notes that go on my website to all these things so you can go and check it out, but I think it's brilliant and congratulations on it, and I really look forward to reading the book. It sounds fascinating.
Leo: Oh, I appreciate that so much. Thank you.
Christopher: Okay. Cheers, Leo.
[0:56:01] End of Audio
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