All that we do in our lives is built of habits. Sometimes these habits are conscious, e.g., how we travel to work or how we style our hair. Often, they are not; how we inject tone into a conversation or how we stand in public.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz once described based on personal experience it takes "a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell." This idea was published in 1960 in the book "Psycho-Cybernetics". The idea circulated and grew to the point it became common belief it had truth; an urban myth. A habit.

Identifying Habits

A habit is a settled tendency or usual manner of behavior. For those swallowing the RP, we can define habits in specific actions:

• Seeking the approval of others.

• Getting angry or upset when our wife doesn't fuck us.

• Being afraid to say "no".

• Creating covert contracts

Some of these habits we developed when we were children. Some of them came as we entered adulthood or marriage. Some of us may not even know because we had developed a habit to ignore the changes in our behavior or in others.

To identify our habits we must first make that exercise itself a habit. This is often tougher than it sounds. We can make a list of obvious shit right way:

1. STFU

2. Lift

3. Read

What about the complicated habits; the habits we don't immediately see?

1. Pessimism

2. Resentment

3. Laziness

These habits often hide deep within us because it makes up such a large portion of our mental model. Though I would exercise occasionally throughout my life, I developed the habit, and the acceptance, of being lazy. "Lift weights? Nah, I just ate a pizza. I'll start going to the gym Sunday since it's the start of a new week." Then it becomes a habit of just not thinking about it. Not recognizing a habit by definition is a habit.

James Clear, author of "Atomic Habits", identifies four stages of a habit:

1. Cue - The cue is a trigger to our brain that identifies the possibility of a reward. One example is when we receive a text message on our phone.

2. Craving - The trigger itself, or cue, has no affect without a desire for the reward; the craving. Do we want to know what the text message reads or not?

3. Response - The response to the craving is the actual habit. We hear the notification, we want to know what it is, so we read the message.

4. Reward - This is the end goal of the habit. We have made decisions in the last two phases that solidifies our habit. Are we happy with the reward of reading the message or not? We will modify our steps at each stage in order to maximize the reward.

For example, I get a dozen phone calls daily (cue). My craving for the call depends on who may be calling. My response is, if the number is not in my contacts, I ignore it. My reward is I don't have to listen to what likely is a spam phone call. Or, if the number is in my contacts, my response is to answer it. My reward is to talk to someone I enjoy talking to.

My wife takes this a step further; she has different tones depending on who sends a text message. Each tone, or cue, determines her actions in the next three stages. Both of us will make minor modifications to the cue and the craving and alter the response (habit) in order to maximize the reward. We don't really think about it, but we have developed these habits and we are constantly refining them.

Creating or Modifying Habits

If it doesn't take 21 days to build a habit, then what does it take? Once we've recognized the habits we want to change, how do we address them? How do we create new habits?

The first step is to actually identify the habit we wish to modify or create. The first habit most of us finding ourselves needing to change is shutting the fuck up. It sounds simple in premise. It seems to be the most complicated exercise.

As we read more about red pill principals we begin to learn other methods of verbal engagement; amused mastery (AM), agree and amplify (AA), and fogging (F - wait, no acronym).

Add on top of that when to apply each technique. Do I AA during a shit test? Or is it AA during a comfort test? I'M SO CONFUSED!

Slow down there, speed racer. You have yet to develop the habit.

As we recognize our bad habits and attempt to develop good habits, we may envision an end goal. If our wife wants to spar verbally we shoot that shit down appropriately, remain in our frame, and bring her back in. When we begin lifting we want to be built like Austin Baraki or Charles Poliquin. It is when we envision an end goal of this magnitude we often fail. We become overwhelmed. It seems complicated. You'll never get there! Information overload!!!

We must break these habits down into smaller habits. In Atomic Habits, we learn of Dave Brailsford, a cycling coach hired to - and succeeded in - bringing a winning atmosphere back to the perennial-losing British Cycling team.

"What made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as 'the aggregation of marginal gains,' which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do."

If we are thinking of mastering verbal confrontations with our wives, we can break it down simply into developing the habit of shutting the fuck up. To do this, we recognize the cue ("You're making that for dinner?"), crave the reward (holding frame), respond (STFU), and accept thy reward (frame held!).

It matters not that it takes 21 days or however long to develop the habit. What matters is we recognize it has in fact become a habit. It is when you sit down at night and contemplate the days events you realize, "Hey, my wife shit-tested me and I held frame. Milestone achieved!" Then we can move on to understanding AA and the other tactics.

This does not mean you should break down every goal into smaller goals and concentrate on one goal at a time. You're a fucking man! Act like it! You've begun lifting, right? You want to be big and strong and deadlift 500lbs? Yet, your scrawny ass can only do 150? Then make 155 your reward for this week. Hit the gym, nail the shit out of it, then set a new reward: 160 next week, and on and on.

Are you in a financial mess? Forget the load of debt. Break it down into smaller events, develop a habit of achieving each reward on a daily or weekly (or biweekly) basis, and knock that mother fucker out the park.

You already should have a list of the goals you wish to accomplish; your mission. Break these goals down into smaller goals. Break them down until they're so specific you can actually measure the progress. Then, set a date. Is it a daily goal? Weekly? Monthly? Write it down. Put it in your calendar. Quantify it so that at the end of the period you can simply say "reward achieved" or "reward failed". Don't worry about if it is realistic or not. The core habit you are creating is the ability to modify habits accordingly. But, don't be cheap either. If you're DLing 150lbs don't you dare set 160lbs in four weeks as your goal or I and every other mother fucking RPer here will cyber-bitch-slap your ass like your mom should have.

What you don't want to do is have a list of penultimate goals and concentrate on only one child of one goal but rather one child from each goal. So, if you have five penultimate goals, you should have five smaller goals - habits - on a regular basis.

Remember, it is not just positive habits we are building. We are extinguishing negative habits. Identify the four stages: cue, craving, response and reward. Modify these stages and the response leads to which will change negative reward to a positive reward.

1% BETTER EVERY DAY

"When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before."

Edit 2: Do not let your guard down with established, positive habits.