The Blue Church vs. The Red Religion: The Battle for How We Make Sense
💌 The Roundup // 007
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Improving Your Habits
Your habits determine your quality of life. They impact your productivity, quality of sleep and even how long you live. Improving your habits is one of the greatest points of leverage for improving your life. This guide will offer some ideas for how you can break bad habits and build better ones.
Note: A vast majority of the ideas in this guide come from James Clear’s book: Atomic Habits. If you're committed to making big changes, I'd recommend you pick up a copy, along with the following resources:
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhig
Hooked by Nir Eyal
The Four Stages of a Habit
Habits occur in four stages: cue, craving, response, and reward. Understanding these steps will help you identify ways to build and reinforce the habits you want to stick with.
Cues indicate that a reward may be on the horizon. Your brain is constantly searching for cues that have historically signaled rewards like food, sex, or praise. Once perceived, cues trigger the brain to initiate a behavior.
Cravings are the motivational forces behind a habit. They signal a desire to change your internal state.
Responses are the actual habits you perform. For a behavior to take place you must have the proper motivation and ability to take action.
Rewards are the end goal of any habit. They both satisfy your initial cravings and teach you which behaviors may lead to more of the reward in the future.
Example:
Cue: Your phone pings with a new notification.
Craving: You want to know what the notification says.
Response: You pick up your phone to read the notification.
Reward: You satisfy your craving to read the notification. Picking up your phone becomes associated with the ping of a new notification.
Discover Your Existing Habits
To improve your own habits, you’ll first want to take an inventory of your existing behaviors. Start by observing your daily routines like waking up, commuting to work, getting to the office, or going to bed. For example, if you were studying your bedtime routine, you might include:
Change into sleep clothes
Brush your teeth
Fill up a glass of water
Get into bed
Check Twitter
Say goodnight to your partner
Turn out the light
Check your email
Set your alarm
For each behavior you've identified, ask yourself whether it's a positive (+), negative (-) or neutral (=) habit. You might rate your list like this:
Change into sleep clothes (=)
Brush your teeth (+)
Use the bathroom (+)
Fill up a glass of water (+)
Get into bed (=)
Check Twitter (-)
Say goodnight to your partner (+)
Turn out the light (+)
Check your email (-)
Set your alarm (-)
A few things to note as you go through this process:
If you’re having trouble scoring a particular habit, ask yourself: “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I want to be?”
Notice what positive habits are missing from your list. For example, maybe before brushing your teeth, you want to try flossing.
Which behaviors are universally negative versus negative in their context? For example, setting an alarm on your phone right before you fall asleep could be negative, since it exposes you to blue light right before you try to sleep. By moving it earlier in the evening you may be able to avoid the drawbacks without sacrificing the benefits.
Committing to New Habits
To start a new habit it helps to make a specific plan for how you intend to incorporate the new behavior into your life. Clarify which cues you’ll use to signal the behavior by filling out this sentence: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”
Examples:
I will run on the treadmill for 30 minutes at 5 pm at my gym.
I will read for 20 minutes in my living room at 10 pm before bed.
You can also use the reward of a current habit to be the cue for a new one. This is what James Clear calls habit stacking. To use this to your advantage, fill out this sentence: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
Examples:
When I shut the door after getting home from work, I will lock the deadbolt.
When I spit out my toothpaste after brushing at night, I will reach for my floss.
If you were using habit stacking to build a morning routine, it might look something like this:
After I pour my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for sixty seconds.
After I meditate for sixty seconds, I will write my to-do list for the day.
After I write my to-do list for the day, I will immediately begin my first task.
Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable.
Design Your Environment for Success
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. While you might be willing to talk to a stranger at a cocktail party, you'll be less likely to strike up a conversation when passing that same person in a dark alleyway. By designing your environment, you can highlight cues that lead to positive behaviors and conceal cues that lead to negative ones. For example:
If you want to remember to floss, position it on the counter in front of your toothbrush.
To avoid eating sugar, don't take any desserts home with you from the supermarket.
If you're trying to do a major behavior overhaul, consider changing your environment completely. By removing yourself from the cues that once triggered negative behaviors you can give your brain the opportunity to form new habits.
By spending the time upfront to craft your environment you won't have to rely on limited supplies willpower to stay on track.
Surround Yourself With Positive Influences
For most of our evolutionary history, humans lived in groups of hunter-gatherers where our survival depended on our ability to form bonds with other members of the tribe. As modern humans, we inherited that natural drive to belong to the group. Part of what allows us to form relationships with others is our ability to observe and mimic their behaviors.
The habits of the people you associate with will have a strong pull on your own behavior. Rather than trying to fight the pull of the group, make a point to surround yourself with people who exhibit positive behaviors and will reward you for performing them with respect, praise and approval.
If you want to eat healthier, start dining with people who stick to strict diets.
If you're trying to drink less, spend time with others who enjoy sober activities
Like cultivating the right environment, selecting the right peer group will ensure your habits require much less willpower to take hold.
Don't Break the Streak
The key to turning behavior into an automatic habit is frequent repetition. Each time you repeat an action, you reinforce the neural circuit associated with that habit. Do it often enough and you'll be able to perform the behavior without making a conscious effort. The important point is that repetition, not time passing, is what cements a new habit.
To keep yourself accountable, find a visual way to track your progress. For example, mark your calendar with an X for each day you perform the behavior and do everything you can to avoid breaking the chain of Xs.
The Minimum Viable Habit
When starting a new habit, find ways to lower the cost of the activity so that you’re more likely to do it on a regular basis. To do this, consider what the minimum viable version of that habit might be. For example:
“Running three miles" becomes "run around the block."
"Clean my room each morning" becomes "make the bed."
"Meditate each night" becomes "meditate for one minute before bed."
To make the habit as easy and frictionless as possible to slot into your life, the initial version of it should take no more than two minutes. Once you've standardized the habit, it will be much easier to optimize it to get the outcome you want.
Automate Your Habits
If you find it challenging to stick with your habits, try locking in your future behavior through a commitment device. These are the choices you make today that direct and control your actions in the future. For example:
Leave your credit card at home so you won't be able to spend money when you're out.
Pay for and schedule a personal trainer to make it painful not to go to the gym
Buy healthy groceries to ensure you'll stick to your diet
There are also some one-time actions you can take that will lock in good habits for years to come. For example:
Delete games off of your phone
Remove the TV from your bedroom
Enroll in an automatic savings plan
Consistency is the key to greatness
To become a writer you need to write. To be a painter you need to paint. And to be a healthy person you need to eat well and exercise. Whatever it is you want to become, the best way to get there is through consistent incremental progress. By shaping your habits, you can change how you spend your resources to become the person you want to be.
The Blue Church vs. The Red Religion: The Battle for How We Make Sense
Something’s broken with the way our society makes sense of reality. You may have first noticed it if you were blindsided by the news about Brexit, or the election of Donald Trump. Or maybe it was the Jeffrey Epstein saga that’s triggered your alarm bells. You’re not alone. Increasingly, lots of people are starting to sense that our existing institutions may not be up to the task of uncovering the truth.
Why is our existing sense-making system starting to crack?
What might be able to replace it?
One of the best thinkers I’ve encountered on the topic of sense-making is Jordan Hall. Those who read the second issue of this newsletter may recognize Hall from his ideas about simulated thinking. Recently, during a lengthy interview Hall laid out his perspective on the turmoil that’s taking place in our society. While I typically advise skepticism before listening to anyone who gets introduced as a “culture hacker,” Jordan is one of the clearest thinkers I’ve encountered on this topic and his ideas are worth understanding.
How we make sense
For most of our lifetimes, society has deciphered reality through a top-down process, which Hall calls "The Blue Church." This paradigm depends on a small number of trusted people to broadcast sensible narratives to a large number of people whose job is to listen. You can see this in the relationship between a news anchor and his audience or a professor and her students. Paraphrasing Hall on how this system works:
When it works well, the Blue Church endeavors to put into place various meritocratic filtering mechanisms to identify individuals who have achieved domain expertise. Those people are then charged with making sense of the world, and expressing that sense through various broadcast channels…
As the message makes its way to the masses, the system selects for those who are inclined to receive and act upon good opinion. For example, take the student. The professor expresses the lesson, and the student’s job is to listen, understand, map the meaningful components of the lesson, and respond effectively to queries about the lesson’s content.
To work, this system needs gate-keeper like newspapers, political parties, and academic journals to ensure that undesirable ideas don’t end up infecting the society. This filtering process ensures that everyone has a common set of facts to understand and communicate reality. Through this process, the Blue Church has enabled humans to create unprecedented prosperity, cure diseases, and even put a man on the moon. However, this paradigm is not without its limitations.
Broadcast is limited in its capacity to perceive and respond to reality. What happens is that every layer of the hierarchy has to compress information. For example, if someone’s out in the field seeing what's going on with rain forest insects, and wants to share that information, he needs to port that information up to someone who's at a think tank who's porting it up to a policy-maker, who's porting it up to a legislative decision-maker. As the message goes up the chain it gets altered and simplified. So, at the very least, you're losing an enormous amount of information.
At any point in the chain, a gatekeeper might alter the meaning of a message or block it entirely. This doesn’t even require corrupt motives. It may be that a gatekeeper has simply misinterpreted a message or didn’t believe it to be true. Of course, it’s also possible to imagine plenty of scenarios in which gatekeepers aren’t incentivized to disseminate the truth.
As a message is broadcast to the public, it must often be simplified in order to stick in the minds of its intended audience. While the public is left with a general consensus on the facts, those facts often end up being a misrepresentation of reality.
The Blue Church finally has a formidable challenger: The Red Religion. Unlike the Blue Church, this new sense-making system uses a bottoms-up process of understanding reality. Often taking place in online forums, this new system uses collective decentralized intelligence with little mediation by gatekeepers. Each individual node of the network is responsible for both sensing information and broadcasting it. Once absorbed, other nodes can choose to amplify the signal (much like what I’m doing with Hall’s message).
Without these layers of gatekeepers it’s easier for groups of people to piece together an accurate picture of reality and disseminate it to the public. To see this in action, watch this account of how Shia LaBeouf inadvertently started a worldwide game of capture the flag with a bunch of internet trolls.
While taking away the gatekeepers reduces the number of potential distortions to a message, it also provides openings for people to spread misinformation. During the last presidential election this sense-making system was hijacked by foreign actors to spread lies, sow discord and promote conspiracy theories. But it doesn’t require a nefarious foreign government to spread bad ideas. Since there is very little vetting, it’s much easier for ill-informed people to get their hands on a metaphorical megaphone.
Right now, these two sense-making systems are going to war. Blue Church institutions like the New York Times report on the toxic practices that have emerged in the Red Religion. Political parties attempt to rig primaries in favor of Blue Church candidates. Meanwhile, the Red Religion fights back by spreading evidence of institutional bias and sowing mistrust.
It’s easy to confuse this fight with partisan politics or the culture wars. But there’s something more important going on here. While right now the red religion is primarily used by extreme political groups it’s worth separating the people from the practices. To some degree, I suspect existing Blue Church institutions may be using the power of the culture wars to distract from this larger fight and engender loyalty to our existing sense-making process. While it is still unclear how this battle will play out, I believe it will only intensify.
Success in this new paradigm will no longer depend on our ability to receive and retain the sensible broadcasted narrative. Instead, we will need to develop the ability to decide which ideas to pay attention to, adopt, and amplify. Nutrition is a great example of this. In a top-down system, all we had to do was remember and adhere to the wisdom of the nutrition pyramid. In this bottoms-up system, each of us will need to compare diets ranging from Keto to Carnivore to Vegan and decide for ourselves what will keep us healthy. While I suspect this transition will be scary, ultimately I think it will incentivize us all to start viewing reality with clarity and express it with more honesty.
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Imagine allowing your coworkers to draw money from your bank account whenever they want. You’d never stand for it. So why do many of us allow colleagues the same type of access to our calendars?
Given the relative scarcity of time this type of theft should be especially egregious. Yet, many of us tolerate, and even welcome, people wasting our time in pointless meetings.
The post argues that we need to think about our time as a precious resource and adopt tools that reflect that philosophy.
🥽 Upgrade your cargo cult for the win
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As you may have noticed, I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of practices we can adopt on a societal level to get a better understanding of reality. One essential transition I think we’ll need to figure out is how to get people to divert their energy from signaling truth-seeking to actual truth-seeking.
To illustrate this idea, in 1974 physicist and polymath Richard Feynman gave a commencement address where he shared his thoughts on “cargo cult science.” Feynman explains:
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
Feynman identifies the missing essential ingredient as “utter honesty.” As the author puts it:
Utter honesty, I suspect, means not just telling the truth, but caring about the truth. Feynman uses the phrase “bending over backward” to suggest a higher standard. You will go to extreme lengths to avoid fooling yourself—partly because then you won’t fool others, but more importantly because you really want to know what’s going on.
Instead of seeking-truth, many scientists perform the right motions to make it seem as though they are engaged in truth-seeking.
This phenomenon is happening all around us. Employees of governments organizations, schools, and companies care more about looking good than doing good.
To develop a devotion to the truth, each of us must become deeply curious about our chosen field. Educators need to be curious about which pedagogical practices drive knowledge retention. Product managers must be fascinated by what features could be added to grow customer loyalty.
If you’re unable to find curiosity in your current job, you owe it to yourself, and the rest of the world to find one that aligns with your interests and drives you toward seeking the truth.
💼 Career Development: What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP
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There’s a story that Steve Jobs used to share with managers at Apple upon their promotion to Vice President.
Jobs tells the VP that if the garbage in his office is not being emptied regularly for some reason, he would ask the janitor what the problem is. The janitor could reasonably respond by saying, "Well, the lock on the door was changed, and I couldn't get a key." An irritation for Jobs, for an understandable excuse for why the janitor couldn't do his job. As a janitor, he's allowed to have excuses.
"When you're the janitor, reasons matter," Jobs tells newly minted VPs. "Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering," says Jobs, adding, that Rubicon is "crossed when you become a VP."
I find this to be a helpful way of articulating the mental leveling-up that one has to do in order to manage and ultimately lead.
I was reminded of Jobs’ story reading Dave Kellogg’s account of the gradations in responsibility between managers, directors and vice presidents.
Managers are paid to drive results with some support. They have experience in the function, can take responsibility, but are still learning the job and will have questions and need support. They can execute the tactical plan for a project but typically can’t make it.
Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision(“set and forget”). Directors know how to do the job. They can make a project’s tactical plan in their sleep. They can work across the organization to get it done. I love strong directors. They get shit done.
VPs are paid to make the plan. Say you run marketing. Your job is to understand the company’s business situation, make a plan to address it, build consensus and get approval of that plan, then go execute it.
I’d be interested to know if this maps to the expectations of these positions at your companies.
👨👩👧👦 The Story of Us
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Tim Urban is like the Banksy or Daft Punk of bloggers. He’s quiet for a while, then drops something amazing that gets everyone’s attention. His latest series attempts to build a grand narrative to explain why human beings are the way we are. In typical “Wait But Why” style, it’s ambitious, fun, well-articulated, and full of lots of crazy stick figure drawings. If you’ve enjoyed books like Sapiens, you’ll probably dig this as well.
Community
Shoutouts
Thanks to Alex Katz for a fun interview last week. Congrats to the whole Two Chairs team on their recent fundraise.
Cool to see Dan Slate being recognized for his sharpness. :)
Had a great time listening to Justin Mares dish out hot takes on nutrition during his latest podcast appearance.
Kushan Shah shared how he leveraged social channels to land a kickass job.
Nice post from Liana Dumitru on building design mentorship programs.
Matias Honorato published a great profile of his CEO at Tally.
Roy Bahat wrote about lies that startups tell to justify their lack of focus.
*Header image credit: Timo Kuilder