A Magicians Guide to Building Better Habits
building new habits
this feels like one of the hardest
things to do right you see
every year millions of people take on
the ritual of
defining a new year’s resolution and
often people start strong
and are under for our path to change but
then life happens
things scanned away and two weeks later
the majority are back to where they
started
now traditional self-help wisdom often
tells you that what you’re lacking
are willpower and motivation but i think
that what you’re missing
are just a few tricks let me explain so
i’m an interaction designer
as well as a retired part-time
professional magician and through making
the switch from
magic to design i’ve learned that these
two things are really doing the same
thing
you’re creating interactive experiences
based on principles of storytelling
and using behavioral insights to capture
and manipulate attention
so just like how a magician uses sleight
of hand designers
we use light of mind and both were based
on psychological techniques
now what i find interesting and kind of
empowering is that you can actually use
these techniques in your own lives
to trick yourself into building better
habits and they work
even if you know the underlying
mechanisms behind them it’s pretty
simple
there are three key steps to doing this
step one is to have a goal so if you
don’t have a goal well then
go get a goal it’s completely up to you
to start
this goal will be your source of
motivation if you’re stuck
perhaps think of an area of wellness
that you want to improve
step two is to understand the habits
that will help you to achieve this goal
so if your goal is to lose weight then
developing the habits of exercising
and eating a healthier diet will help
you to get there if your goal is to be
more environmentally friendly then
developing the habits of recycling
and reducing your plastic usage will
help you to make an impact
now step three is an important step that
most people miss
design your environment for success
allow your motivated self the one who’s
ready and wants to change
to design your environment for your less
motivated self
so that even on the days that you don’t
want to go through the motions
it makes sure that you do now this can
be
a little tricky because in order to do
this you need to set up interventions
that
persuade and manipulate your attention
just enough
to help you to change your behaviors
when motivation and willpower
aren’t enough here are a few tricks i
learned during my short-lived career as
a magician that i think will help with
this
the first is misdirection which is a
fancy term for
misguiding your attention in magic
this tool is often used to take your
focus away from where you want to look
to where we want you to look and helps
to cover up those secret moves are being
performed that creates the effect of an
illusion
misdirection is based on the insight
that we humans are really only good at
focusing on one thing at a time
and that our perceptual systems can
easily be used to misguide us
it follows the simple idea of if it’s
out of sight
it’s out of mind and opposite which is
sometimes more powerful which is
if it’s insight is in mind so
knowing this how can we use misdirection
in our own lives to help us to build
healthier habits
as an example let’s take wanting to
improve our diets
as our goal if we have a bunch of foods
at home
that we know that we shouldn’t be eating
we can misdirect our attention away from
them
simply by hiding them inside of some
sort of generic opaque food container
and placing them behind some healthier
snack options in our cupboard or our
fridge
now simply placing these treats in a
container may be enough to add some
friction to curb our behaviors
but this intervention is much more
effective when there are healthier and
more
visually attractive food options present
to act as that misdirection when we feel
the urge to snack
that way when you open up your cupboard
or your fridge those tasty bun healthy
snacks
won’t be the first things that you see
and you’ll be less likely to
impossibly snack on them over time
you might even forget that they are
there now
obviously it’s better and probably more
efficient to just
prevent those snacks from appearing in
your house in the first place
luckily there’s another trick that we
can use for that as well it’s choice
architecture now choice architecture
refers to the way that you can present a
set of options to people
to influence their decisions this takes
advantage of our default bias
which is our natural tendency to follow
things as they are and to accept
defaults when making decisions
as well as the framing effect which
describes how people make decisions
based on whether the options are
presented to them
in a positive or negative way when a
magician
asks you to pick a card chances are
there’s a bit of choice architecture at
play sometimes the deck can be stacked
in a particular way
our cards can be manipulated and
presented to you
in a manner that increases the
likelihood that you’ll pick a certain
one
so going back to our example what if we
were to make a list
out of all the snacks that we would
normally go to buy
that is our default options and look at
them through the lens
of whether or not they will help us to
achieve our goal
if our motivation for wanting to change
our diet was to lose weight
or to have more energy throughout the
day by eating more natural and nutrient
dense foods instead
then frame and look at each snack option
through the lens of whether or not it
will help you to achieve that goal
that way when you go out to buy some
snacks you’ll be less likely to follow
your defaults
as you’ve been habitually conditioned to
do and you can instead
architect a new sub-snack choices based
on your goal
tristan harris from the center for
humane technology
who is coincidentally also a magician
turned designer
says that if you control the menu
you control the choices in other words
if you’re the one
architecting the choices that are being
presented to the person on the other
side of an interaction
and if that person on the other side of
an interaction is you
what options would you want to give
yourself so no i’ll hand it off to you
how might you use misdirection and
choice architecture in your own lives to
trick yourself
thank you