Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The One Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Welcome to 2025. This is our first episode of The One Thing podcast in a brand new year. And I don’t know why, but when they’re divisible by five, I think they’re special. So, 2025 is going to be a great year for you, and we’re going to try to give you some information to make it so.
Now, are you one of those people that says New Year’s resolutions? I’ve seen stats that say that as many as 100 million people around the world launch their year with a New Year’s resolution. Resolution is just a short hop, skip and a jump from a habit, which we write about a lot. But the problem with resolutions is. 80 percent of them fail. Only less than 20 percent will actually make it through to form the habit they set out. So, one way of looking at how we start the year is about 80 million people kind of stumble coming out of the gate. And we don’t want that for you.
If you’ll remember my episode towards the beginning of December, I walked you through my journey of tracking my habits, the small habits that I had built that made a big impact on my life. Those are keystone habits. I often call them power habits when they’re really connected to a goal. And we’re going to talk about the three things that you can do to make the habit that you’ve chosen stick, making sure that you can actually make it through to the other side to make it line up for our goals.
And the beautiful thing about habits is when you work for a habit, eventually, it’ll work for you. So, let’s dive into what we know about behavior change, about habit formation. And by the end of this show, I’m going to share with you the most impactful habit in eight and a half years that we’ve ever helped people form. We did it in a huge cohort and it transformed their lives.
Now, first step, first reason for people to succeed when they’re forming their habits is they realize it’s going to take longer than they planned. So many people go into habit formation with the wrong idea about how long it’s going to take for that resolution to stick, for that habit to actually form. People think that habits form a lot faster than they actually happen.
When we were writing The One Thing, we found dozens and dozens of books that talked about habits and how important they were for productivity and success. And the crazy thing is they kept saying that habits would form in 21 or 30 days. And we were researching. We had two fulltime researchers along the journey with us, and we kept asking, “Well, where are they getting this information?”
And it was kind of crazy, they were all referring to each other. This selfhelp book would then point to the other selfhelp book, and that selfhelp book would point to another selfhelp book. And at some point along the way, you started to see it move from 21 days to 30 days and back and forth. But there was no original underlying research. It was kind of like trying to trace a game of telephone game back to the original saying that started the whole thing.
Well, eventually we did find it. In 1960, That’s how far we had to go back, 1960, there was a bestselling selfhelp book called Psycho-Cybernetics by a guy named Dr. Maxwell Maltz. And he was a plastic surgeon. And I think the reason the book took off is he was trying to address poor self image. How do we tackle poor self image? Which I guess if you’re in the business of plastic surgery, you are literally trying to help people with their image issues, but he was also going from the outside to the inside.
In that book, he talked about it taking on average about 21 days for his patients to look in the mirror and actually see the new you as them. It took them about 21 days on average to recognize the physical change and it to feel normal for them. That 21 days got hijacked by the self-help industry and became colloquially known as this myth that it takes 21 days to form a habit. And somewhere in that game of telephone where they’re all quoting each other, someone kind of flubbed it and they said 30. And then people started quoting that. And it was really this circular game.
So, here’s the thing, we asked the question, “Well, how long does it take to form a habit?” And there is actual research. So, researchers at the College of London in 2009, they actually did a huge study, a couple of hundred students. They could do anything they wanted. Some people said, “I’m going to commit to going to my yoga classes.” Some were going to drink eight glasses of water. Some were going to quit smoking. Some were going to quit drinking. Some were going to take up reading every day. Some were going to journal. You name it, it was all over the spectrum.
Some things that were objectively pretty tough, like giving up smoking, and some things that looked kind of objectively kind of easy, like getting two or three thousand steps a day. They, then, followed those students along their journey and every day the students had to answer two questions. Did you do the thing you said you were going to do? Yes or no. And two, how hard was it?
And so, what they found when they looked at the graph. People who kept saying yes day after day, the effort would start to fall away. And on average, around 66 days, that was the average, the median, it got as easy as it was functionally going to get. They called it the point of auto-mosaicity. That’s where something kind of becomes automatic. 95 percent of the effort to do it has gone away. And the interesting thing is that all of the effort doesn’t go away. It gets as easy as it’s functionally going to get. And that’s when they peg that being the moment of habit formation.
Now, you look at the data. Some people, man, they got it done fast – 18 days. They would have actually been maybe some of the success stories in that Strava research, people who by the second Friday, like they either failed or they went on. Maybe they had formed something that was so compatible with their old behavior, it wasn’t that hard and it just set. I don’t think it’s about someone having a superpower. I think it’s about how much behavior change they’re actually taking on. The average is 66 days, though.
Now, the important thing to know about that is that it’s two to three times longer than most people think. If you think you’re running a race that is 21 or 30 yards, are you still running fast at 40 yards? No. Most people actually will start to slack off. They will start to shut down a little bit before they get to 21 or 30 days because they see the finish line. If you’re not a trained racer, you’re not going to sprint through the ribbon. So a lot of people underestimate how long it takes to form a habit and they don’t have the right expectations. You’re just going to take longer than you think.
I had one of our people we were working with that was forming a habit. They were trying to quit smoking. That’s something I did way back in the ’90s, and I remember how hard it was. And they did 66 days. And they came to me and they said, “Victory! I’ve quit smoking.” And I remembered the full range of data. And I just think, is quitting smoking an average kind of habit? I didn’t think so. I felt like it was maybe a difficult habit. And I just said, “Does it feel like you’ve really won the battle?” And they admitted, “I don’t think so.” And I said, “Great. Why don’t you just do another one? Why don’t we make sure? Why don’t you stay focused a little longer?” And they actually did another 66-day challenge.
And I remember it was around at day hundred, it’s another 40 or so days down the road, they came into my office and they said, “You know what? I haven’t thought about grabbing a cigarette in almost a week and a half. I think I’m there.” And I then gave him a high five. So again, if you walk into this journey, not thinking, “It’s just a few weeks. It’s my January, my dry January. And then I’ll be so much healthier,” no, that’s just a snapshot of behavior. It’s not actually behavior change. Go into this thinking it’s going to take longer. And I promise you, you’ll walk away happier.
Now, I’m going to give you an example. This is the one I use most of the time, brushing your teeth. For most of you listening, I hope a hundred percent of you listening, brushing your teeth this morning required almost no energy at all. None at all. You woke up, you stumbled into the bathroom, you grabbed your brush, you grabbed your toothpaste, you did your job, you went off to get your coffee. Whatever that looks like for you and your morning routine, it was probably pretty automatic.
Now, I’m a parent of two kids. I can tell you it takes a lot longer than 66 days to form that behavior. And if you’re a parent, you’re probably laughing and nodding your head. There were many nights, six, seven years into the journey where you would have to call their bluff. “You brush your teeth, really? Let me smell your breath,” because whatever reason, right, it’s behavior change that a lot of small kids don’t want. It’s hard to explain to them one of the reasons we live so much longer than our great grandpas and great grandmothers is because of our dental health. It actually has extended our lives decades or more. So, hugely important habit. It’s not a giant one, but it does take years to form when we’re kids. If you’re just starting that journey, hopefully as an adult, it would be 66 days. But today, just realize, the effort doesn’t ever completely go away.
This is another thing to know. You never get to be scot-free. It never becomes so automatic, you never think about it. There’s probably at least one time every 12 to 18 months where you’re juggling your coffee and your backpack, you’re heading out your door to get in the car, to get on the subway, however it is you get to work, and you’re just about outside of the home zone, and you kind of run your tongue across your teeth and you go, “Oops. I forgot to brush my teeth,” and you have to rush back in. So, no matter how long you’ve been doing the habit, there’s still this tiny bit that you have to do to maintain it. But that’s part of the beauty of habits. You work to form it and then it takes so much less effort to maintain it.
So, there, that’s the first step. Plan on it taking longer than you thought. And I promise you’ll be happy you did. It’s not a race. It’s about getting to that point where it becomes automatic and you don’t have to focus on it, and then you can add the next one and the next one and the next one.
The number two big one, and I talked about this a lot in my habits episode in early December, is start small. I think people think big and act big. We see it all the time. But with habit formation, we really have to start small. We have to focus on things that we can actually control, right? We can’t take on behavior that is in the realm of things that we can’t consistently control because the whole point of habit formation is being consistent. It’s in the consistency, as we’ve said a few times in the last month, that we find our intensity.
So how do we show up, find victory and build momentum? My coach Jordan has observed that adults tend to gravitate towards two strategies on behavior change. They, either, are doing some sort of extreme behavior modification, right? Think like The Biggest Loser or something, “I’m not just gonna lose some weight. I’m gonna lose like 80 and I’m gonna do it in this many months,” or they’re trying some gimmick. I really think that we need to focus on starting small and that avoids that extreme behavior change.
One example. I think about a lot, a lot of people’s New Year’s resolution, how they want to launch their year, especially after two months of the holidays, right? You came off of Thanksgiving. You had all of your family gatherings around Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever it is you celebrate or just being out of school and out of work, you had all of those holiday candies, all of those, that fair that you ate at the movie theater, whatever it was, you’re like, “Man, I’m going to get in shape to start the year.” And what they do is they go big. And what it looks like is they will set a goal that involves them going on a rather big change in their diet and also a big change in their workout behavior. And the problem is saying, “I’m going to get in shape,” is not a single habit. It’s a tangled mess of habits.
Let me just see if I can even break this down. If you’re going on a diet, the first thing you have to change is the way you shop for food. So, when you go into the grocery store, you have to change your behavior there. Two, you’re going to have to not only shop for different foods, you’re gonna have to learn how to prepare them. If you’re not eating lots of raw veggies before the diet, and now you are eating vegetables after the diet, you’re going to have to learn how to dice and cook and steam and all the things that you weren’t doing before.
You’re probably also going to have to learn to prepare different size portions. And in some diets, you might have to learn how to eat on a different schedule. Think about intermittent fasting. Now, I don’t eat breakfast, but I do eat after this time in between this time. Like right there on just the dietary side, I’ve got four that I can easily identify.
Now you go to the health lane, the workout side, if your new gym behavior involves you going to the gym first thing, which would be where I would recommend. If you’re going to start that habit, do it in the morning while you have willpower. That’s what we say in the book. But now you probably have to start going to bed at a different time. We have to now commit to actually getting out of bed and going to the gym. Just getting up in time doesn’t mean we’re actually going to get to the gym.
Four, we have to look up and say, wow, I have to learn this new routine. I’m going to be doing new exercises or different exercises. And I don’t know about you. If you’ve changed your workout routine in the last few years, you probably realize that there’s a new recovery thing that you have to deal with. If you’re not used to doing squats or burpees or whatever, your body feels different the next day. It may be satisfyingly sore, or it might be hold-your-back-and-moan-and-walk-around-the-house kind of sore recovery.
And then, here’s the other thing. You’re working out all the time now? Guess what happens to your diet? You’re probably hungry a lot more often because you’re burning more calories. So you may also have to go all the way back to the diet and add a whole other behavior change and make sure that you’re snacking properly.
So I’m just spitballing here. And I just came up with nine potential behavior changes in this, “I’m going to get in shape to start the year.” So when we talk about the best practice would be to start small, pick one of those things. And if you’re lucky, you can select… or you’re strategic, you can select the habit that is most likely to unlock a lot of the other behaviors naturally.
What is the thing that will flow downhill? I will tell you if you buy different foods in the grocery store and therefore have healthier, better foods in the house, that is the start of eating better. If you don’t have good things to eat in your home, you’re not going to eat good things. You have to kind of go upstream and look at that. So, start small. It’s going to take longer than you think. Start small.
And the last one is good accountability. And I’m going to hit this on the other side of the break, but the best programs I’ve seen for behavior change involve some form of accountability, whether it’d be through groups or through coaches. And groups are great, right? When we are joining a group, a cohort, like we do group coaching, like the first domino course that you may have heard about, it’s a group coaching program where we have a cohort of people going through it together, and we get a chance to get to know each other, we get a chance to support each other. You see this in CrossFit gyms. You see this in outdoor workouts like Camp Gladiator here in Austin. People get used to, “Oh, you work out on Wednesdays too?” and they notice when you don’t show up. “Hey, Jay, we missed you last week. Where were you?” And there is a form of accountability in someone missing you.
I’ve hit this note before. Sharing it on Facebook is not community support. There’s good research that I’ve shared before that when you just say, “Hey, I’m doing this thing on Facebook,” so many people congratulate you. A lot of times you actually lose your motivation for doing the thing. So, this is real-world community. These are people that you’re gathering with on a regular basis online or in an actual room to support each other towards a common goal.
A coach, obviously, is paid to hold us accountable to our goals. And by “hold accountable,” it’s not like a child would think of it. They’re working with us to keep our goals front and center to remind us of our motivation for achieving it and to help us navigate the 180s, the inevitable setbacks that come. Both of them are absolutely fortifying. If you looked at the 80 million people who fail, I would almost bet my life that those failures involved not doing one of those three things. They had the wrong expectations for how long it would take. They started way too big instead of starting small, and they probably didn’t have accountability around them.
Now, it’s probably time for us to take a quick break. And on the other side, I’m going to break down how to design a power habit for your 2025. If you’ve got a resolution, you could trade it out. If you’ve already formed a habit based on you’re a student of The ONE Thing, this will give you a chance to refine it maybe a little bit. Narrow it down and focus it. So, I’ll see you on the other side of the break.
All right, welcome back. Now, let’s take a look at what I refer to as a power habit. Every year in our ONE Thing business, we help lots and lots of people form habits. We actually probably helped multiple thousands of people over the eight plus years we’ve been doing this. Twice, sometimes three times a year, we’ll pick a date, often the beginning of the year, maybe the middle of the year. You could actually do five 66-day challenges in a calendar if you were really going for it. I don’t really recommend that, but you could. But usually, at least twice a year, we will run a cohort of people who come together because they need to add a habit, a purposeful habit to their life to hit their goals.
And we’ve gathered research on that. We believe so strongly in the 66-day, we actually trademarked it. So, we call these 66-Day Challenges. Would you like to take a 66 day challenge? And the goal here is to identify that first domino, make it a habit and it be aligned with our goals. And that, to me, is the fundamental difference between the power habit and a keystone habit. I put the power habit a level up.
A keystone habit, let’s just say what a keystone is. If you can imagine the stone bridge, like the arched old fashioned bridge, the last stone they put at the very top of the arch in the middle is called the keystone, and it creates the resistance that holds all of the other stones in place. It is the one stone that makes all of them stick together. So, a keystone habit is a habit that tends to have a chain reaction of positive things behind it. Other habits stick to it, right, those stones, and it has a much bigger impact. So by focusing on this one keystone habit, it becomes much bigger because all of these other benefits fall behind it.
The distinction I make with a power habit, there’s lots of habits you have in your life, good and bad that are keystone habits, and they unlock a lot of other good and bad in your life. A power habit is one that we have chosen to do. It is something that is aligned with our goals. A power habit is like a keystone habit with intent. It has intention attached to it.
Now, when I look at all of the data from eight plus years of helping people form power habits, if I’m being honest, in these 66 day challenges, three things really stand out. First and foremost, the power of community and accountability. Keystone habits when people are purposeful tend to have a huge multiplier effect. And then, finally, we actually identified one habit that just kind of hands down ruled them all.
So again, community and accountability. We wrote about accountability in The ONE Thing. It’s kind of towards the back, right? It’s around the commitments that we make to productivity. And if you have accountability in the form of a coach, in the form of a peer partner, in the form of a group that you’re working with, our research, it makes you 76.7% more likely to achieve your goals. And in that research, you know, we were thinking you need to write down your goals. That made you around 30 percent more likely to achieve them. Yeah, because writing gives you clarity. You get it out of your head and on the paper. You have to stare at and go, “Does that actually make sense what I’m trying to achieve?”
So, it makes sense. Writing down your goals matters, but not as much as people think. But if you… in this study, they had to send their goal and their progress via email every two weeks, and the people who committed to these progress reports via email, I actually think that’s pretty light accountability, they were 76.7% more likely to achieve their goals. Massive impact from just a little bit of accountability. So if you’re really committed to changing a fundamental behavior in your life, you need to have people around you that you’ve empowered to hold you accountable.
And I’m just gonna do a little aside here. You’re an adult. Man, so many, especially entrepreneurs and leaders, the idea of being held accountable, they have a visceral reaction. Here’s the way you should look at it. You’re an adult. No one gets to hold you accountable. You know, our parents did that to us when we were little. Maybe our teachers did that to us in grade school. But as an adult, we actually get to choose and we get to live with the results of those choices.
However, you can choose to be accountable to the goals that you share. Are you choosing to be accountable? Are you choosing to look for your own DNA in your failures? Are you choosing to make adjustments so that you can win in the end? When you hand that accountability to someone else to help you, they give you perspective and you are, in fact, holding yourself accountable, but with help.
All right. If that helps you get past that little retrograde urge to run away from that word accountability, I hope it does because I don’t want that little thing maybe carried over from grade school or from a very strict parent or teacher to make you think that accountability is bad. It’s not. It’s actually one of the superpowers in the universe. That’s what the top achievers leverage consistently to get what they want. And on the low end, just said, 76.7% more likely to hit your goals. It’s how achievers get off of their duffs and into action every single day.
Two, keystone habits matter. I remember Admiral McRaven, he’s here in Austin. He is, at that time, was, I think, the president, very high up in the University of Texas. He wrote a book called Make Your Bed, and it was lessons he learned as a Navy SEAL. And a lot of it was told through the lens of their hell week, right? That period of time where they are being tested 24 hours a day. As a Navy SEAL in training, one of their first jobs every day was to make their bed. And they had to make it to perfection, or they or their whole unit might be actually punished. And by perfection, someone would come in with a ruler, and the sheets would be exactly precisely laid out. You could literally bounce a coin on it. It had to be not just well done, it had to be perfect in the estimation of the sergeant or whoever the officer was. It was actually kind of a grueling task to start your day.
The point, though, he said, making his bed, no matter how horrible his day, how many times he had to carry a log through the surf or roll in the sand, all the things that they had to do, they would end their days, and the first thing they would see before they went to bed was a job well done. They had learned to start their day with a small thing done well. And that had a magnificent impact on their attitudes and everything around it.
So, Geoff Woods, my old co-founder, and I, we’d love that book. We said, “Hey, why don’t we make our next 66 day challenge a make your bed challenge?” We just wanted to see, like, is this stuff true? We had several hundred people join in. My wife and I started doing it. And here’s what I can tell you, the people who started making their bed started reporting a halo effect from that simple act. Just by committing to make their bed before they went to work, before they went to play on the weekends, they would have to make their bed, that was the commitment, they reported so much positive impact.
So, if you go back, it’s kind of buried in The ONE Thing. Researchers Megan Oden and Ken Ching talked to us about this. When they were doing research with students on habit formation, they noticed what they called a halo effect. And now I connect all of this to a keystone habit. The halo effect. These students were doing one thing. I’m focused on my yoga class, my eight glasses of water, walking 10, 000 steps, you name it. But they started reporting fewer dirty dishes, better diets, watching less TV, studying earlier and longer, less and less frequent use of tobacco and alcohol, that they were sleeping better. All of these other positive things were happening without them focusing on it. That’s the hallmark of a keystone habit.
And I can tell you that little test we did around making your bed, that is clearly a keystone habit for so many people, the one thing that you can do that makes a lot of dominoes fall down, which leads me to To the ultimate keystone habit that we’ve discovered over the last eight plus years. In one year, every single week, one of the rituals of accountability for our lives is we sit down with our goals, we ask based on where I’m going this year, what do I have to do this month? Based on what I’m going to do this month, what I have to do this week? Based on what I’m going to do this week, what do I have to do today? We call that goal setting to the now. We’re working backwards from our future goal to ask appropriately what I have to do in the moment. And we put all of that on one goal sheet called our 411.
And the challenge was, could people look at their goals every day before they picked up their phone? And we did this because there had been some research that came out that said something like 80% or more of humans that have smartphones, within 15 minutes of waking up were on their smartphone. So, the first thing they’re doing, I mean, a lot of us use it for their alarm clock, right? So the first thing you do is look at your smartphone. What lives on your smartphone? Social media, TikTok. You have these mindless time machines, right, that send us off and we’d lose track of where we’re going. You have texts and emails.
And in my experience, emails and texts, some of them can be fun from friends, but if they’re involving work, they almost always involve other people’s priorities. You can go into email, your inbox, and it’s a little bit like a time machine too. If you actually get focused on it, kind of caught up in flow, you can look up and a whole hour has gone by, and you’ve actually done nothing towards your own goals, right? So you go on your phone and you’ve got these distractions kind of tend to live there. Yes, there’s some great productivity stuff, but there’s also all of this other junk.
So, we challenge people, goals before phones. Before you can look at your phone other than we allow people to use it as alarm, but they could not pick it up. They just had to tap it and move away. They had to look at their goals. And in that context is, what was I supposed to do this week? And based on that, what am I supposed to do today? What naturally followed is people would think about their day. Does my day actually line up with what I’m supposed to do today? Once they had done that little thought process, it takes really about a minute, I mean, it’s so fast, What did I say I was going to do today? Okay. I’ve got that clear,” then they were allowed to pick up their phones.
Here’s what we found out. This power habit, this power keystone habit of goals before phone, the people who did it reported they said no to more distractions. They worked on their priorities earlier in the day and for longer. They felt more control. They felt more calm and they had more clarity. And obviously, their results went through the roof. This tiny habit, 60 seconds a day of looking at their goals before they went into the vortex, that is our smartphones, was giving them the clarity about what they were saying yes to.
And here’s the thing, I say this all the time in our keynotes and our training, when you actually are clear about what you’re saying yes to and you know why you’re saying yes to it, it’s kind of easier to say no. “Hey, no, I can’t do it then. My 11-year-old’s got a soccer game and I’m going to be on the sidelines. I have said yes to my kid. I’ve said yes to being on the sidelines and I will have regrets if I say no to that.” When we know what we’ve said yes to and why, the nos actually become easier. You just give your regrets, “Hey, man, I can’t do it then. I’ve already got another commitment.” You don’t have to share that it’s to yourself, but you’ve made the commitment, the nos come easier.
One of the number one reason people get derailed is their inability to say no. So, my challenge to you this week is Is if you did not have an intention, your goal set for the year, your resolution, your habit, I mean, hopefully you listen to that episode where I walked through my 12 plus years of doing this and said, “Well, doggone it, I’m going to do this for me.” And I would challenge you in the absence of a better choice, choose goals before phone. In terms of power habits, it’s going to line you up to have more success on all of your goals than anything else that we’ve seen in eight and a half years. So, that’s your challenge.
If you had not already selected the habit to launch your year, you’re less than a weekend when you’re listening to this, there’s still time for you to claim something that you can actually do, have the right expectations for doing it, making it small enough, like the power habits that I’ve described, that you can do it and have a big impact on your life. That’s my challenge. In the absence of a choice that you’ve already selected, go ahead, goals before phone. Let me know how it works for you on socials. Go to our comments. I would love to hear because I remember how amazing this was for our cohort of community members around The ONE Thing. They were astounded. And so were we.
Now, we’re at the end of the episode. I hope you learned a lot. I hope I’ve doubled down on this idea that small habits matter, that you don’t have to do it all if you do the right thing first. These are big principles of The ONE Thing, and they’re going to come up a lot, folks, because we need to hear it a lot. It’s so easy to get off track. We need to be reminded that our narrow focus is how we win the big game.
Next week, I’m talking to my good friend, Shawn Blanc. Shawn Blanc is a journalist on productivity. He has been writing about it and blogging about it, gosh, for 13 years now. He runs a business that helps busy entrepreneurs find their focus. And one of my favorite things is he’s helped people like in that 50-60 hour week that a lot of entrepreneurs and leaders work, he’s helped them identify that couple of hours that actually represents 95% of their success. Sounds a little bit like The ONE Thing, doesn’t it? I think you’ll enjoy that episode. I hope to see you again next week.
