Andrew Huberman Ph. D., is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Here is the advice he gives for developing billion dollar habits in life, business, health, and relationships.
“Set three or four habits that you want to create for yourself. so find six habits and decide every day you’re gonna do four but never compensate day to day.”
“So you’re going to list those out on your calendar and then every day you’re going to do at least four, but as many as five but if one day you only get one you don’t carry over and do 10 the next day.” [1]
What are the 3 steps to forming a habit?
- Set goals for what you want to accomplish.
- Create a systematic process for using habits to achieve your goals.
- Train yourself to do the habits consistently but only be rewarded randomly.
Habits are like software you download into your brain where you begin to automatically do things. Repetition creates new neural pathways in your brain and makes certain actions your natural default settings. For athletes it means practice creates muscle memories where thinking isn’t required during a game. For business it means that consistency of execution becomes automatic.
Failure with habits comes from doing too much too soon and setting a pace that’s unsustainable. Forming a habit that will lead to achieving goals comes from quantifying the daily actions needed within the framework of a systematic process that will lead to success in the long-term.
The highest levels of success in any field come from the consistency of daily actions that move people toward their goals. What a billionaire needs to be doing daily will be different from an athlete but the principles are the same. Everyone also needs to diversify their habits for all areas of their life like exercise, wealth, inner peace, relationships, and nutrition.
What are the three types of habit?
Keystone Habits
Keystone habits are the daily routines someone operates on consistently with little thought given to them. This sets the normal level of actions and behaviors you do with no need for willpower, thinking, motivation, or persuasion. Your primary keystone habits are your default settings for consistent action. They can be either positive or negative and have compounding results that can be good or bad.
Sleep is the most important keystone habit that should occur each day in your final 16-24 hours. This is not optional and will maintain your mental acuity, ability to manage stress, and keep your energy levels high. Going without optimal sleep can only be maintained for short periods of time and can hurt long-term performance and cause burn out.
Linear Habits
Linear habits are things you know how to do and you just need to do them, like eating healthy, exercise, reading, and working. These are good to do early in the day after waking up in the first nine hours of the day. They are the easy habits to create and put on auto-pilot. These habits keep your life on track with the basic maintenance. These habits take effort to start and maintain but should eventually move into becoming keystone habits.
Non-Linear Habits
Non-linear habits like creative writing and brainstorming are best to do later in the day after the mind has settled down and become more calm. This is the daily analytic work where you must think and create solutions for problems. This is the hard work that so few people want to do but it has the biggest rewards financially. These are the billionaire habits that you must create the time, energy, and mental space for.
“He who works all day, has no time to make money.” – John D. Rockefeller
These habits are best to do after the first 10 hours until bedtime. This is where millionaires and billionaires are so different from other people that remain employees. Their mind automatically thinks creatively about businesses they can found, products they can build, and technology they can invent.
These are the most important habits to cultivate and reinforce to build wealth. This is the habit of thought, pondering, and asking “What if?” These habits tend to come naturally for self-made billionaires but most people have to work to get this habit started.
“Thinking is the hardest kind of work — which is probably the reason so few engage in it.” – Henry Ford
What is the 85% rule for learning?
Studies have found that the quality and rate of learning is maximized when the difficulty of training is set to keep the accuracy to around an 85% success rate. The research shows that training at the optimal accuracy happens exponentially faster than training at a fixed difficulty level.[2]
Using training, learning, and teaching to improve performance only works inside a framework with feedback. If you have no errors or competition to show you where to course correct then little to no progress is made. Success is only achieved by making mistakes and learning from them. However, too many mistakes can lead to financial or mental ruin and demotivation.
The optimal success rate for learning and growing has been found to be 85% from a psychological standpoint. Scoring 85% wins can give you the motivation to keep going and the 15% of errors gives you feedback on what to correct and improve on. If you have a 100% success rate at anything you’re doing and find it too easy you’re in a zero growth mode. Growth only comes from seeking higher levels of achievement and increasing errors and your failure rate.
Your habits determine your destiny more than your desires. You don’t get what you want, you get what you create in your life. This best way to create what you want in your life is to develop a systematic process for achieving your goals then program yourself to do the daily actions that will get you there.
Billionaires are passionate about their vision for a business, technology, and company. This gives them energy to design their life for success.
