A

I've had many leading experts on this show, including Matthew Walker, and they've all said the same thing about sleep. They've said it's the biggest positive investment you can make in your own performance. You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you're consistently tired, poor decision making will follow and eventually cause other things to fail in your life. So if you're looking to optimize your recovery, you should start looking at what you're sleeping on. Our sponsor, Helix makes high quality mattresses tailored to your body. It doesn't matter if you run hot, sleep on your side or need something firm. Helium Helix has a mattress for you and I asked them recently to send one to a member of my team and Juan received it and we travel a lot. So when he's home, quality sleep really matters. And he told me he's getting the best sleep of his life. And the data backs it up. With 82% of people in a Helix study saying they saw an increase in their deep sleep. And with a 120 night trial, you've got four months to prove it to yourself, you can get 27% off@helixsleep.com diary that's helixsleep.com diary. Earlier on when you said that ambitious people, they have lots of aspirations, lots of habits they want to start, I was thinking about myself and thinking there's probably 30 habits that I would like to acquire. I'd want to be better at writing, I want to be a runner, I want to be better at speaking, I want to be a better friend and be more attentive with my friends and make sure I text them on their birthdays and, you know, all of these new habits that I want to pursue, how does one know which one to aim for first? Is there a framework for knowing?

B

Yeah, there's some things that you can do. I don't think to your point earlier about sometimes the riskiest things just take a long time making the decision. You know, maybe you should just pick one and work on it and then you can get on to the next one. But I do think there's some level of strategy which is a good place to start is by asking yourself which habits are upstream from other good things happening. So, for example, I know that if you were, maybe the. Maybe the question to start with is when you live a good day, when you feel dialed in, when things are like, rolling along well for you, what tends to be part of that day? Sleep, you know, okay, great. So that's, you know, I would say for me Sleep. Sleep is definitely one. I would say getting my workout in and usually reading and writing are a part of it. But I think I could just boil it down to reading if I just read like 10 pages. That often sparks the writing. So like, to me, reading is like the fuel for writing for me. So. So I could say get a workout in and read for five minutes or 10 minutes. Those are the two things that are part of a good day. And what happens is they're upstream from a lot of other good things happening. For example, if I get the workout in, yeah, I feel good, I get the benefits of the workout. But I also have a post workout high for like an hour or two. So I. My focus and concentration is better. I sleep better at night because I got the workout in, now I'm tired. I tend to eat better when I work out. It's when I'm not working out that I eat terribly. I don't know, it's kind of like I don't want to waste it or something. So at no point was I trying to build better focus habits or sleep habits or nutrition habits. Those just came kind of as a natural consequence of getting the workout in. So what are those things that you do that are upstream from other good things happening? I think those are good anchor habits to start and focus on. If I could add another one for myself, I would say it's a little bit of time. It's really just time to think, but it's time to reflect and review. There's this interesting thing that happens if you have a really good work ethic, if you have a strong work ethic and working hard has gotten you far in life, it kind of becomes a crutch. For a long time I was like, if I ever had a problem, I was like, well, I'll just work my way out of it. I'll just work harder on it until I figure it out. And that's great. That's really powerful for a lot of things. But at some point it breaks, you know, like you can maybe, if you really try, maybe you can work 10% harder or 20% or harder. But there's some limit. But if you work on the right thing, well, you could get a hundred x the result or a thousand x the result. And so if you just keep your head down and work hard, it's very unlikely that you'll be spending your time in the highest and best way. And the only way to figure that out is to have time to reflect and review, time to think, you know, so you need enough Time to think, to figure out what should I be focused on next? And so I think that is. It's almost reflection. And review is almost like the meta habit that is above all others. Because if you give yourself time to reflect and review, then you can troubleshoot your habits and figure out how to adjust them.

A

I was thinking as you were saying that that that time to reflect and review is actually also a review of are my current systems moving me closer? Because when you're talking about that, I was thinking of times in my life where I was so close to, like, the picture and I was so in the trenches doing the thing that I hadn't come up to even say, actually, is there a system I could put in place to solve this problem over the next five or ten years? Like, for example, is there a person I need to hire? So actually, should I go into the hiring process versus being there fixing the problem myself? Should I spend 10 hours this week on hiring a candidate to do this, or should I be doing it? But sometimes you get so caught up in the trenches when, especially when things are tough and difficult and moving very quickly that you don't review your systems. And also when you talk about systems, I thought about how systems sometimes expire.

B

Sure.

A

Yeah. Because things change.

B

That's a great point. And I think this is probably one of the most overlooked things with habits. A lot of the time when someone sits down and they want to build a new habit, they don't say this, but what they kind of assume is what it would mean to be successful with this habit is that I do it for the rest of my life, you know, and that if at some point I'm not doing it, then that must mean that I failed or I quit on it. But that's not how it is at all. Like, things have a season, you know, and so habits have to change shape over time. Let's take my writing habit, for example. The habit that launched my career was I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday, and I did that for three years. So the first three years, 150 articles, you know, write twice a week. That was a great habit. They were like 2,000 word pieces or so. But then I signed the book deal for Atomic Habits. I didn't have the capacity to do that and also write the book, so that had to change. I wrote the book for like three years, and then the book came out. And now I write a newsletter once a week, and that's much shorter. But I kind of feel like my writing habit is maintained that whole time. It Just changed shape. But that's fine. It just needed to shift based on the season. But I don't know, people, they get so attached to one form of a habit sometimes that they don't realize that it's no longer serving them. And I think that's one of the trickier things to give up is a habit that used to be good for you, that used to work well, but no longer serves you in your current season. I find that I'm kind of a slow learner with that.

A

I guess parents can probably really relate. Cause they're forced to basically change their goals and therefore their systems would have to. I mean, you're a father of three, so you probably know this much better than I do. But has there been systems that you've had to sort of.

B

I think there's lots of inflection points in life. So having kids is one of them. Starting a new job, moving to a new city. You know, it can be big stuff like that. I've just talked to a mother who. Her kids moved out, so she's now an empty nester. You know, she's like last 25 years been parenting all these kids and now finally they're all out. But it feels, in some sense, it almost feels like a loss of identity. You know, you're like, I thought I was one thing and now, you know, feels like things have shifted. But also it just signals an inflection point in life and a new season that you're in. And when your seasons change, your habits often need to change with it.

A

When you talk about this, four burners theory, I guess, dovetails into what we're talking about here, where you use this to kind of think about what habits to pursue in any season of life. But also a phrase that I've heard so often, specifically from mothers on the show comes to mind, which is that you can't have it all at the same time. And I've heard that, I think four or five times. Different mothers in particular, which is. I mean, says something about society.

B

Yeah.

A

Have said to me that they've had to realize that they can't have it all at the same time for sure.

B

So this is not my concept. This is the idea that I came across called the four burners theory. And it breaks life into these four burners on a stove. So you have work and career is one, you have family, friends, and then personal health or, you know, yourself basically as the other. The idea is that for the burners to really be going well, you can't have all four on at the same time.

A

And burn the stove.

B

Yeah, yeah, the stove top. So you, you have, you can choose. You could have three going on at kind of like a mid level, but if you really want them to do well, you can only have two on at the same time. And you know, who knows? I, I don't know if it's true or not or whatever, but it's an interesting idea. And what it does is it gets you to realize, yeah, a fundamental part of life is trade offs and you cannot be good at everything at the same time. So this is true across projects. If you choose, try to do seven things at once, spreading yourself thin in seven different ways. Very hard to be excellent. For me, what I think about is life has a series of seasons and life has a series of sequences. So let's say it's not always exactly 10 years, but let's say the big movements in Life are roughly 10 year buckets. So for me, building my first business, that was kind of like a ten year thing. And eventually it led to the launch of atomic habits. You maybe get 5 or 6 of those in your adult life. Some of those things make sense to do in a different order than others. Like if you want to travel the world and see a bunch of places and party in Ibiza, you're probably not going to do that in your 60s. You know, like, I mean you can, there's no, nobody's saying you can't, but some things are probably better sequenced in other, you know, in other spots. Obviously there's, you know, especially for women, there's a certain limit on, if you want to have a family, what decades that happens in. So yeah, it's just a matter of sequencing and prioritization. If you look at the tapestry of your life, what do you want the big movements to be and where do those seasons need to slot in? Yeah, there is no right answer, but it's interesting. As soon as you realize it's a finite number and as soon as you realize that trade offs are always gonna be a reality, you have to deal with that in some way. I've decided that right now, while my kids are young, I'm gonna turn the career burner down. And that's fine. It's not gonna be how it was for the last 10 years, but that's okay. Cause they're only five once, they're only turning six once, they only go to second grade once, and I wanna be there for all that. So there are always trade offs.

A

I think that sequence point is super interesting. It got me Thinking, because you're right, there are sort of some constraints, whether they're biological constraints or in the case of your kids, like just natural constraints that mean this season can only happen now here.

B

Right?

A

Yeah.

B

There's also some things like, you know, both of us are fairly young entrepreneurs. I'm so glad that I started a business in my twenties rather than my fifties. Doesn't mean you can't do it in your fifties. There's no nobody saying you can't. It's just that it makes things a lot easier for the next decade. You know, it's easier for me to be there for my kids now because I have control of my time because I did the business part in the previous decade. And so the risks. Yeah, and that doesn't mean it's always going to work out or whatever. It doesn't mean that you're going to be able to perfectly plan it all. But you just see how the sequences can stack up in that way.

A

And how important do you think when we're talking about habits, do you think repetition is? Because there's so many of these sort of well known concepts or frameworks in habit formation. One of them is that habits take roughly 66 days. One of them is that it's about repetition. Does repetition really matter?

B

It definitely does. I mean, repetition is how habits form. The 66 days number comes from one study that came out that found that on average it took about 66 days to build a habit. If you look at the study, the range is pretty wide. So if you pick something really simple like drinking a glass of water at lunch each day, that might only take two or three weeks to form. If you look at something more complicated, like going for a run after work every day, that might take seven or eight or nine months to form. And so I don't know that 66 days really tells you anything. It doesn't tell you that this is how long it's going to take for your habit to stick. I mean, the range is wide. Sometimes when people ask me, how long does it take to form a habit? My answer is forever. Because if you stop doing it, then it's no longer a habit. And what I'm kind of getting at with that is that habits are not a finish line to be crossed. They're a lifestyle to be lived. You know, and so we approach our habits as if it's a finish line. Oh, let me do this 30 day cleanse and then I'll be healthy. Let me do this 90 day sprint and then the product will be shipped I won't have to worry about it anymore, you know, and it's like most things in life, especially the big important things, they're endless. They're endless battles, you know. So just because you went to the gym yesterday earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. Like, you still have to show up tomorrow just because you were a good spouse yesterday earns you no bonus points for tomorrow. You still have to be loving and caring again. And so all the things that really matter are endless battles. And it's not about crossing a finish line. It's about living that kind of lifestyle. And so, yes, it is true that repetition matters. And yes, it is true that the habits will become more seamless and automatic and maybe a little less effortful as you repeat them more. But that doesn't mean that you'll never have to think about them or worry about them again.

A

Do you think much about what's going on in the brain when repetition occurs? Like, what is it that's making it easier? If I've been on a roll with the gym, I've been going for 60 days in a row. Why does it feel easier on day 61?

B

That's a tricky question. Because if you were to talk to an academic and they would tell you, like a habit is this automatic non conscious behavior, really quick, simple things like brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, every time you pick up a pair of barbecue tongs, you got to tap them together twice. You know, like stuff that you don't even really think about. Okay, that's actual habitual behavior. But if I were to ask you what are some habits you're trying to build, you would say, I'm trying to go to the gym four days a week, or I'm trying to write every morning, or I'm trying to meditate, you know, five days a week or whatever. And, and I know what you mean when you say that. You mean I want it to be this routine, this practice that I do consistently. But like, writing every day is never going to be mindless the way that brushing your teeth is, you know, going to the gym is not going to be automatic the way that tying your shoes might be. And so the things that we. There's a little bit of sloppiness in the word habits and how we use it in life. It's not. They're not automatic, mindless routines. Most of the time, most of the things that we want to be habits are not like reflexes. They're routines and rituals that we do consistently. So having said that, it is true that after you've gone to the gym for a month or two, it does start to get easier. And I think there's a number of forces that kind of work in your favor there. One is you figured a lot out about what it takes to get into the gym. What time am I going? What route do I take? How do I pack my bag? Do I need to bring a water bottle, or is there a water fountain at the gym? Like, all those sorts of things are little one time costs that you got to figure out early on that once you're into a pattern, you already know them. You know, the water bottle thing sounds like a small thing I heard from someone who said, I always forget to bring my water bottle, and they don't have water fountains at this gym. So, like, I sometimes I skip the workout because of that. You know, it's like. It's remarkable how little friction it takes to pull us off course. And so figuring out all of those things is something that once you're a month or two in, you've crossed all. You've, you know, you've fought all those battles, and now you know how to do it. So that makes it easier. The other thing is you start to build friendships, start to build connections. You start to know the people there. You feel comfortable there. There's this concept Steven Pressfield talks about where, you know, if you have a wolf and it's roaming around, eventually it starts to feel like it has its territory. And early on in the process of creative process, writing a book or whatever, you go into the office for the first time to write the first chapter of the book, and you kind of feel uncomfortable. It feels like it's not you yet. You go to the gym on the first day, you feel like people are judging you. Do I look stupid? I don't know how to do this. But after a while, it becomes your territory. It's just like the wolf. It starts to feel like your home court. And so that familiarity, I think, also makes it much easier to stick to the habits once you start to feel comfortable there. And that takes a little bit of time. And then the last piece is identity. The more that you start to follow this habit, the more you repeat a habit, the more you reinforce being that type of person, the more you start to have that element of your story. I think this is one of the most important things for building habits and getting habits to stick, which is how your habits reinforce your desired identity. We often start by asking, what do I wish to achieve? But I think what we really should start with Is who do I wish to become? What are my actions reinforcing? What are my actions taking me closer toward? In a sense, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, doing one pushup does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence does not finish a novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer. And no, sending one bit of positive feedback does not make you like the world's best leader, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of leader who cares about their teammates. And individually, those are small things, but collectively, you build up this body of evidence for being that kind of person. It's a little bit different than what you often hear. Like, you often hear people say something like, fake it till you make it. And I don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it. Like, it's asking you to believe something positive about yourself. But behavior and beliefs are a two way street. And so what you believe influences the actions you will take. And the actions you take also influences what you will believe. And my encouragement, my suggestion is to start with the action, to let the behavior lead the way, to make one sales call or meditate for one minute or do one pushup and let that in that moment be evidence that you were that type of person. You know, if you go outside today and you shoot a basketball for five minutes, you don't instantly think, oh, I'm a basketball player. But if you do it every day for next three months or six months or year, at some point you cross this invisible threshold where you have to admit, I guess playing basketball is like kind of an important part of who I am. You know, I guess it's part of my identity. And once you adopt a habit as part of your story, once it becomes part of how you see yourself, it's not just like, I need to go for a run, it's like, I am a runner. You know, I go, I do this because this is part of who I am. Then you'll fight to maintain the habit, right? Like, then, then it becomes easier for it to stick. And so the connection between habits and identity, I think, is ultimately how you really get habits to stick for the long run.

A

It reminds me of a study I was reading recently that said if you speak to someone in terms of giving them an identity versus using a word as an adjective, the behavior, curse. So an example would be If I. You do something for me and I say, do you know what, James? You. You are a kind person. In the studies, people become more kind. But if I say that was kind or that action was kind, people are less kind. So if I can give you feedback that embodies your identity, then you're more likely for that behavior to occur. So with my team, and this is maybe giving a bit of the game away, I will often refer to them as an identity. I will say, you are an innovator, you are an experimenter. Because from the studies I've read, that increases the probability that they embody that identity.

B

There's another study that did it for voting. So people were more likely to go and vote if you said, like, I am a voter. You got them to identify as I'm a voter, rather than, are you voting today? And so, same, same thing. There's an example in Atomic Habits. I talk about. Imagine two people who are trying to quit smoking, you know, and so the first person gets offered a cigarette and they say, oh, no thanks, I'm trying not to smoke. And the second person gets offered and they say, oh, no thanks, I'm not a smoker. And so the first person is trying to resist something that they still see themselves as, but the second person no longer sees themselves as the type of person who smokes. And yeah, some of the evidence and research suggests that once you adopt those identities, it's easier for you to stick to the behavior.

A

Reminds me of the research from Leon Festinger, the guy that came up with the term cognitive dissonance. The way that I understand the concept of cognitive dissonance is that if I have a perceived identity of myself and something external threatens that or challenges it, we're not good at living in contradiction. I'm not good at. So, for example, I'm a. An accountant right now, and I hear that AI is doing accountancy work amazingly well now. I've invested 10 years in that accountancy degree. I see myself as a great accountant. My, my sort of initial reaction will probably be to either dismiss my current identity as a great accountant, that that's going to have a great career in the future, or to dismiss the AI and he talks. Well, people that have studied his work talk about how we're very poor at being able to hold two contradictory things to be true at the same time. So we tend to protect our identity.

B

Yes, there's something incredibly powerful about this that also ties into habits, which is that a lot of our identity, not the whole thing, but large portions of our Identity are tied to our relationships. You know, I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a, you know, and so like it's the connection that we have with others. Our social bonds influence the picture that we have of ourselves. This is something that widely influences our habits. You know, so we are all part of multiple groups. Sometimes that group is large, like what it means to be American or what it means to be British. Sometimes that group is small, like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of this family or a member at the local CrossFit gym. But all of the groups that you belong to, large and small, have a set of shared expectations for how you act, have a set of social norms for what you do in that group. And when your habits go with the grain of the expectations of the group, they're pretty attractive. You know, like you want to stick to em, you get praised and rewarded for it. You fit in. And when they go against the grain of the expectations of the group, they're kind of unattractive and you get criticized and it doesn't feel good. And so if people have to choose between I have habits that I want, but I'm cast out, I'm ostracized, I'm criticized, or I have habits that I don't really love, but I fit in, I belong, I'm part of something. Most of the time, the desire to belong overpowers the desire to improve. And so you want to do something different, but you also know you're going to be heavily criticized for it or you're going to at least add friction to your relationships. And we don't want to live with that dissonance, that dissonance of I could have this, but I also create friction here. One of the lessons, I think one of the big takeaways if you want to build better habits and get habits to stick, particularly for the long run, is you want to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Join groups where you can rise together, where the people that you're surrounded by have the type of habits that you want to have.

A

It reminds me of this thing that appeared in Jeff Bezos shareholder letter about resisting the equilibrium.

B

Hmm, I didn't know about this guy.

A

So in Jeff Bezos shareholder letter, he writes to shareholders that when referring to Amazon's ability and desire and need to innovate through the future, he says he makes a comparison to Richard Dawkins book the called the. I think it's the Blind Clock Maker.

B

Yeah, the Blind Watchman.

A

Blind Watchman.

B

Yeah, yeah.

A

And says that essentially all living organisms live in this constant battle to resist their equilibrium. And actually, death itself is when we become our environment. Because right now, me and you have huge amount of energy expenditure to be different from our environment in terms of temperature, in terms of acidity, et cetera. And he's making the comparison, which sounded a lot like what you just said. That if you want that all living organisms are in this constant battle to be different from our environment. And the more different our environment is, the harder the fight. So if I go to the desert, my body has to put out even more energy to be a different temperature, to be a different sort of acidity than the environment. But if I want to make my life easier and make that fight easier, then go into an environment where my environment is the same as my internal. My internal state. That's great.

B

I think that punchline of the more different your environment is from the habits that you want to build or from whatever equilibrium you're trying to achieve, the harder you will have to fight to maintain. And that is a fight that you can do for, I don't know, a day, a week, a month. But it's some limited amount of time. At some point, it just is draining to try to grind against the environment all the time. Sometimes I view environment both physical and social, almost like a form of gravity. You know, like the physical environment that we're in right now, okay, that's always nudging you in certain directions. Like, I'm sitting in this chair right now talking to you. I could be sitting anywhere else, but I would have to sit on the floor. Right. The environment of the chair is ushering me to this spot. It's almost like a form of gravity pulling me here rather than getting me to go somewhere else. When we leave this room, if I wanted, I could try to do something crazy and break through a wall or climb through the ceiling or whatever, but I'm gonna go through the door because that's where the environment is naturally nudging me toward. It's where that behavior happens easily. And all of our spaces are like that. You're always being kind of pulled toward what is natural and easy and consistent in that environment. So how can you prime your environment to make those the things you wanna do? That's for physical environment. Social environment is the same. You know, it's all. You're always kind of being pulled toward what the behaviors are that are natural there. What are the social norms? What are the things that people get praised and rewarded for. What is the culture typically calling you to do? And that's where I think the answer is. You want to surround yourself with groups who have the behaviors you want to have join groups where your desired behavior is normal. If it's normal in that group, then you can rise together.

A

So, I mean, that must mean getting rid of certain people in one's life. And sometimes those people are hard to get rid of because they're families, their mums, their dads.

B

Sure. And I, you know, I'm a little. Sometimes you hear people say things like, fire your friends, you know, or whatever, like, and I'm not, I'm not all the way there. I think that yes, it is true sometimes you have an extreme circumstance where it's a particularly toxic person or something like that. And yeah, like, you know, you probably, maybe should not be around them and that those can lead to very hard decisions. But I would say for the majority of life and the majority of your relationships, what we're really talking about here is not getting rid of relationships. We're talking about finding specific places where that habit can thrive. So here are some examples. There's a number of studies that have shown that it tends to be easier to build a new habit in a new environment. So for example, if you. Well, first let me back up. There's an interesting way to define what a habit is, which is that it is a behavior that is tied to a particular context. So for example, your habit of watching Netflix might be tied to the context of your couch at 7pm and whenever you walk into your living room and you're by your couch and it's in the evening, you're kind of naturally being pulled toward picking up the remote and doing that, because that's the context the habit happens in. So if you want to build a new habit, and again, these studies have found that it tends to be easier to build a new habit in a new environment. Well, let's say you want to start a habit of journaling. Well, you walk into your living room in the evening and you sit down on the couch and you're like, I'm gonna start journaling. But you're naturally, you know, your brain is kinda like, well, it's time to pick up the remote and turn on the tv. That doesn't always mean that you need a brand new space like a new building or a new room to do every habit in. But you could do something like you could get a chair and put it in the corner of the room and that becomes the journaling chair. And the only Thing that you do when you sit in that chair is you journal for five minutes. So now you have a new context that is tied to the behavior that you want to perform and in the social sense. So this is what we were talking about previously. You want to be able to create a space that is a safe place for that environment, for that habit to live or for that habit to thrive. Let's say sometimes those spaces are ready made. Like, let's say you want to do yoga four days a week, but you look around your family or your friends and your apartment that you're living in, nobody else is interested. They don't want to do it too. You do it in the living room, you kind of get made fun of or you're stepping on other people's space. They're like, I'm trying to do stuff in here too. You know, it's just kind of inconvenient. Well, you can go to a yoga studio and that's a place where for that hour you can be surrounded by a group where your desired behavior is normal. You don't have to fire any of your friends, and you can just go to the place where that habit can thrive. And I think each habit likes to have that. It likes to have somewhere where it can exist in a way that it's going to be supported or in a way where the environment makes it easy. Sometimes the environment is ready made like that. Other times it's not. So for me, one of the most useful things that I did in my entrepreneurial career, I had no entrepreneurs in my family, no authors. So I had this thing that I kind of wanted to do, but I didn't have anybody close to me that I could like, look to. First six months I was an entrepreneur, I sent like 300 cold emails just to other people that were like a year or two ahead of me. Someone who seemed like, you're actually doing this thing where, you know, you've got this online audience and you're, you're writing about stuff. You, like maybe 30 people got back to me. I did like a little, you know, zoom call or whatever and, you know, we chatted and connected. And then I met some of them at a conference like six months later. So I was six months in. I knew like maybe 10 people that I met in person and I had like 30 that I had reached out to. So now it feels like, okay, at least I know a couple people who've done this thing. And I started hosting these retreats every once or twice a year. I get six or eight authors together. And I'd say, let's just rent an Airbnb, we'll split the cost and we can talk about how to build an audience and how to grow your email list and how to write a book and launch it and all the stuff that we were kind of focused on. It was almost always like the best six months, best weekend of my year, because I would have six months worth of stuff that I need to execute on after that was done. That's kind of like going to a yoga studio for yoga. But you had to create the space. I was always worried that I was gonna look like some dork, you know, and like invite everybody and they would all say no or whatever. But everybody wants the same thing, you know, they're all waiting for somebody to create the space for like minded people to get together. So sometimes you need enough courage to create the space yourself. But the punchline is the same, which is you're trying to surround yourself with people where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

A

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