A case study that is interesting:
Planet Fitness has a $10 gym membership that gives unlimited access. This is a ridiculously cheap price. Planet Fitness is a thriving business, despite its low prices. Its stock price has increased 134% in the last five year.
How can a business make so much profit despite offering such low prices? This simple trick will do the trick! They’re betting on the majority of us not showing up.
A typical Planet Fitness gym can only hold 300 people. A typical Planet Fitness gym has 6,000 paying customers, of which half never make it to their gym. You should thank those gym members who don’t bother to come to the gym for subsidizing your membership fees.
Every year, “exercising” more is the most popular New Year’s Resolution, followed by “eating better” and “losing some weight.” Google searches for “gyms” peak in January every year, before declining for 10 months.
The failure of New Year’s Resolutions is so predictable, that gym chains with billions of dollars in revenue have built their business models on them. Why do we fail to achieve our goals so often? What can we do?
Our failures are not due to a lack in desire. It’s really, really difficult to break bad habits. You can try to force yourself into trying something new by using your willpower for a couple of days. But sooner or later you’ll find that you miss a day. Next, another day. You’ll be too exhausted to go to the gym at 5:30AM on your third day. Your coworkers invite you to happy hour at 6PM, so you won’t get there after work. The cycle continues until you realize it has been a whole month since you last worked out.
The world conspires against us, don’t you think?
James Clear, author of atomic habits has studied habit formation more than anyone else. In this blog post, he states that it takes about 66 daysfor new habits to form.
Let’s go back to that gym experience. Assume it will take you 66 days to form a habit to go to the gym. This is 66 chances for traffic, oversleeping and last-minute invites to ruin your progress. It is almost impossible to complete the two-month gauntlet without incident, and these incidents will compound each other in order to ruin your progress. No wonder we suck at developing new habits.
It’s a bad idea to wake up every day and grind for 66 consecutive days. We don’t need to that. It may take 66 consecutive days for a new habit to form, but it doesn’t mean you have to make that many decisions.
It is important to “lock-in” your decision to act in advance so that you are more likely to follow through on it.
My life as an example:
After college, I wanted to continue my Spanish until I was fluent. As with most people who have studied a language, I fell short of my goal. When I returned to Sevilla two years later, I was shocked at how far my Spanish had fallen.
After returning from Spain, I tried several different apps, including Duolingo, Babbel and others, but nothing worked. After a few weeks of “practicing”, I’d go days without studying, and then it would be weeks or months before the cycle started again. Italki changed my life. Italki lets you pay for hour-long 1 to 1 lessons in your chosen language with a teacher of your choosing. In my case, lessons were not important. I needed to talk as much as I could.
It was now possible to speak every day. The next challenge was finding the time for speaking every day.
Italki lets you pre-book bundles of 5 to 8 lessons. The problem I had with learning a language was that there never seemed to be enough time to sit down and actually study the language. I would spend my days in classes or at work. Any free time that I had was spent with my friends or doing other things.
Spanish was never in my “filler” rotation.
When I was able to schedule lessons in advance weeks, they became an important part of my life. I did not plan my Spanish study around my life; instead, I planned (at least in part) my life around my foreign-language studies. Spanish, as far as my schedule is concerned, is no different from a corporate finance course, rugby practice or business meeting. The cycle is never broken because I book the next set of classes before the last one.
So long as I renew my lessons before the previous bundle expires, I will never make a decision to learn Spanish again. This is a part of my everyday schedule that I do automatically. Working with a study partner rather than studying alone is a great incentive. Nobody wants to be a ghost teacher, do they?
Here is another recent example of my life.
In 2023, I would like to cook more. The problem is I don’t want to go shopping. It’s a pain to go before or after class. After I ran out groceries in the autumn, I developed a habit of eating at a coffee shop for breakfast ( option ) and lunch near campus. I also ate takeout for dinner or with friends. This cycle continued longer than I had hoped: In October and November, I did not cook a meal at home.
Like with Spanish, my cooking time was filled with other activities.
On November 29th, a company named ButcherBox sponsored an article on my blog. ButcherBox delivers a box of quality meat that has been pre-selected to your home. While I was browsing their products, it struck me that I would have to either cook at home every month or waste $150 worth of meat if I received this box at my doorstep each month. So I signed up.
After my first shipment arrived in Decembre, I found that it was much easier to go to the local grocery store to buy vegetables, side dishes, bread, eggs, cheese and all other ingredients needed to make meat-based meals. It’s a pain to buy everything from scratch. It was easy to build meals around predetermined meats. Surprise, surprise! I made the majority of the meals in my home for the first time since months.
The reason most New Year’s Resolutions fail is that we are unable to stick to the habit for long enough to make it stick. Try flipping the process if you want to see your 2023 resolutions come true. Make your resolutions come to you instead of forcing them to happen.
Want to hit the gym? You can sign up for personal coaching sessions to be accountable to a trainer. You want to learn salsa? Book one-on-one lessons with a teacher. No matter what habit you want to develop, decisions taken today will force future you into action. Future you will be pleased with the results.
