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