Luke Mathers - Curious Habits: Why we do what we do and how to change

Acknowledgements

As I said earlier in the book, Im not the first to think that everything has been thought before. This book has been a curation, a gathering of information from generations of smart people from B.F. Skinner to B.J. Fogg, Bren Brown to Judson Brewer, and Johann Hari to Benjamin Hardy and Malcolm Gladwell. Books are a big part of my life, and I am so grateful to all the wonderful authors whose books have moulded my take on the world. This book has adapted the recipes of others and hopefully pulled the good bits into one good dish. I am forever grateful to those authors who inspired and taught me.

To Mick Zeljko, my guru of all things neuro and my favourite person to bounce ideas off.

Georgia Murch, Paige Williams, Lynne Cazaly and Amy Silver, you all taught me to be brave and how to have tough conversations from a kind place. To all my coaching clients, Im convinced I learn more from you than you do from me.

You cant polish a turd, they say, but my editor Brooke Lyons can find a good idea buried in my combinations of mixed metaphors and poor grammar, and thanks to her polishing skills, this book is actually readable. I will miss our chats. To Lesley Williams at Major Street, you and your stable of authors are all inspiring humans. Thank you for entrusting me with the Your Next Read podcast and encouraging me to write this book. I am beyond proud to be part of the Major Street team.

Lastly, and most importantly, to my beautiful wife Karen (you are the string on my helium balloon), and daughter Chloe: your ability to tolerate me when I need to bounce half-baked ideas around is a true measure of love. Thank you for giving me space when I needed it and pulling me out of rabbit holes that werent helping.

To you, the reader, if you got to here I am truly grateful and hope you have a new love of and curiosity about your habits.

Thank you for sticking with me until the end. Its been emotional!

About the author

Luke Mathers is positive of two things:

You cant LEAD if you are no good at STRESS; and

The first person you have got to LEAD is YOURSELF.

He is the author of Stress Teflon, RESET and now Curious Habits. Twenty-eight years of running successful businesses have taught him that stress isnt going away any time soon. If you want to have better health, relationships and success, you need to get good at stress.

As one of the original directors of Specsavers in Australia, Luke was part of the biggest retail roll-out in Australias history 100 stores in 100 days. His practice was the biggest in the country and set global records that were previously unheard of.

Luke retired for the first time at age 31. After transforming his UK Specsavers practice (increasing turnover by 350 percent in just three years), Luke returned to Australia to relax and put his feet up. It wasnt long before he realised he missed something stress!

Helping people get curious about their habits and reset stress is his mission. Through his keynote speeches, workshops and coaching he helps people turn threats into challenges. As the book says, Its good being you when stress doesnt stick.

Chapter 1

You are a bundle of habits

We are mere bundles of habits. William James

A concerned father was worried about his sons bad habits. He sought counsel from a wise old man. The old man met the boy and took him out for a stroll. They walked into the woods, and the old man showed the boy a small weed and asked him to pull it out. The boy did so with ease, and they walked on.

The old man then asked the boy to pull out a small plant. The boy did that too, with a little more effort. As they walked, the old man asked the boy to pull out another weed, which he did. Next was a small bush, which the boy managed to pull out with a bit of a struggle.

Finally, the old man showed the boy a bigger tree and asked him to pull it out. The boy failed to pull it out even after trying several times in different ways.

The old man looked at the boy, smiled and said, So is the case with habits, good or bad.

We all have habits some that help and some that dont and if William James is right (and I suspect he is), our habits become a big part of who we are. Habits are the things we do that dont take much thought. They are our defaults. Research suggests that anything from 40 to 70 percent of the things we do are habitual.

There is an old saying often (wrongly) attributed to Aristotle that says, We are what we repeatedly do. Our habits become our identity. If you exercise every day, you become a fit person. If you have good habits with money, you become a wealthy person. If you have a habit of appreciating the good things in your life, you become a grateful person. If you only notice the negative, dark side of life and have a habit of being constantly pessimistic about everything, you become a miserable bastard. What we repeatedly feel, think and do drives our habits, and those habits form who we are.

None of our habits are permanent. If we get curious and want to change them, we can. If we want to change how we look at our habits, we can do that too.

The tree in the parable that opens this chapter could provide beautiful shade for a picnic. We should be glad the kid with the bad habits couldnt pull it out. If we do want to get rid of the tree, though, curiosity is like a chainsaw, and we can chop that sucker down branch by branch and build a log cabin.

Getting curious about habits and how they work can allow us to shape our health, happiness, businesses and who we want to be.

Humans have been curious about habits for centuries. By the early 20th century, scientists were starting to work out how little conscious thought is behind lots of the things we do. Russian dog-spit guru Ivan Pavlov discovered that if he rang a bell before feeding his dogs, he could get them to salivate by ringing the bell even if there was no food nearby. Walk past a bakery and smell chocolate-chip cookies coming out of the oven, and youll see that we are not that different from Pavlovs dribbling mutts. Our brains are prediction machines: we love a good pattern and search for signs that help prepare us for whats coming next.

Around the same time as Pavlov was getting dogs to drool to the sound of bells ringing, Columbia University professor Edward Thorndike started to look at how we learn, how habits form and how to change them. In the late 19th century he was one of the first to describe the habit loop, shown in .

Figure 1.1: The habit loop

Thorndike described the Law of effect, which stated that any behaviour that is followed by pleasant consequences is likely to be repeated, and any behaviour followed by unpleasant consequences is likely to be stopped.

In the 1940s and 50s, along came B.F. Skinner and the behaviourists. This group of brain boffins did a bunch of experiments with animals to work out why they did the things they did. It turns out, the sea squirt was not on its own: mice, pigeons and dogs all move towards pleasure and away from pain.

One of the most cited, repeated and famous experiments of the 20th century involved Skinners box: a contraption Skinner invented to study animal behaviour in a controlled environment. This box was set up to give rewards or punishments for different actions. Skinner and the other behaviourists discovered they could get animals to demonstrate a behaviour (like tapping a lever) by offering them a consistent reward (like tasty treats). Pigeons learned really quickly that if they tapped a lever inside the box, they would get some seed. He noticed that the animals quickly developed a habitual response to being in the box. Get in the box, tap the lever and chow down. You beauty! By finding the right rewards, these behaviour geeks could get pigeons to dance.