Thomas Rolley 00:00
The benefits of repeated habits, benefits of repeated habits, this were shown in fascinating experiments cut done in Hungary.
And you may have heard of this.
But there were three sisters that the dad decided to say that, you know what I want to prove that genius can be trained, genius can be taught, and it's not an innate gift.
So what He did was He pulled his three daughters out of school, and homeschooled them from a very young age, from like four years old, and made them all play chess every day, for 568 hours filled the house with chess books, filled the house with pictures of grandmasters.
And what happened, all three girls became exceptionally good at chess.
Now, this is documented in this very fascinating book, atomic habits, by James clear chapter nine.
The point that He goes on to make is that our habits are influenced by our environment, that three particular groups, the close, so our family, what are the family habits, then the many, what do most people do? And finally, the powerful these three groups, the close, the many and the powerful, strongly influence us.
And what was really interesting to me is that this book starts to touch on ideas that I had already seen before in another book about psychology called Influence influences, a very famous book by Cal dini.
And in it, He speaks of our automatic nature, why human beings will do things that seem strange or order almost automatically.
And James brings up as well; he speaks of this as a major time-saving function of the brain, that if everybody is doing something, then most likely they are right.
Even if they're wrong, the habits that my family have been indoctrinated into me before I even have a chance to assess whether they are good or whether they are bad.
This brought up some interesting challenges.
For me, it was like, Well, you know, what habits Are I unconsciously teaching my children? Today, I had an interesting experience, I took my daughter to the dentist, and they said, Look. Unfortunately, the teeth have become baby tooth has become decayed.
This whole, the inanimate enamel in a baby tooth is very small.
And it's eaten through, and I was like, Okay, what's going on? They're like, well, too much sugar.
Not enough flossing, none of brushing my teeth.
Okay.
And this, to me, was very interesting because, in my childhood, I had all of those things shoved down my throat pretty heavily, like, meticulously, you must do this, you must do this, you must do this, just just it was there was no choice.
And so I feel like I have swung in a reaction to that to be loose on my children with their tooth brushing and it's costing them just got to have the tooth out; they got to do a filling in the one next to it.
And these are in baby teeth to protect them and make sure that
Thomas Rolley 03:49
the other teeth don't come out in a strange direction when she already had another problem with one of the teeth not coming out.
And it made the adult tooth grow behind.
So we were heading for braces, most likely.
But also that brings up in me a lot of trauma, a lot of interesting trauma. From 13 to 17 or so, I had braces; it was brutal.
It's horrible, you know, like to, I don't know why we do it to teenagers to force them into braces.
But anyway, might you know what, maybe wait a little bit and maybe until 2022 when there's some frame of reference that adolescents use are hard enough without having to actually go through them with braces nonetheless, what I'm taking from this is that the habits that I was instilled with as a child were too harsh and the swing back was for me to be to slack in terms of instilling the regular brushing and flossing in my children, particularly allowing them too much sugar.
So somewhere in here is an optimisation, and the unfortunate thing for my daughter Is that she will have to experience the consequence of poor habits.
Hopefully, we will learn from those and at the dentist's chair.
I got him to speak to us so so what do we how do we change what needs to change He said, one, you need to floss once a day, two, you need to brush twice a day, and three, needs to limit sugar.
And then I got my daughter to repeat those back, and what was fascinating.
She comes to me tonight and says Dad, can you help me floss never had that happen before.
So really interesting to see that change in her habits having been made out of this painful situation.
All right, that's all I got for tonight.
I hope you got some value out of this discussion about how habits which are systems that are being run every day, actually go ahead and create the results that are extreme in some cases, particularly with the poker sisters, who became chess prodigies, just by focusing habitually on chess.
I look forward to seeing you next episode's continuous journey into power systems create results.
See you then.
