(2017-07-07) Cain Where Personal Breakthroughs Really Come From

David Cain: Where Personal Breakthroughs Really Come From

Here it is: you ledger your income and expenses

That’s the entire commitment—just tracking the income and out-go.

Without any budgeting or self-imposed restrictions, you’ll automatically make far better use of your money. (Personal Finance)

It works because it’s impossible to be aware of the actual numbers behind your behavior without your priorities changing

I’ve spent my entire adult life experimenting with Self-improvement campaigns of all sorts, and nothing has worked better than tracking alone. Just recording the numbers—without striving to change anything about what you’re tracking—almost always creates a sustainable, healthy transition to a better way of doing things. (Quantified Self)

Exercising Willpower is painful, and we can’t rely on having enough of it to sustain us for the months it takes for the new standard to become easy to meet.

Occasionally we do succeed this way, and meeting our new standards eventually becomes easy. But that’s not because we finally became masters of Self-Control. It’s because, in the intervening time, what we want to do has changed.

Tracking without striving does this from the start. Keeping aware of dollars actually spent, hours actually worked, miles actually run—changes what you want to do

The daily Commitment (Habit) is so small—writing a few digits on a chart, whatever they are that day, for whatever behavior is important to you—that you’re not tempted to quit. Yet this small act of accounting is enough to bring the consequences of your choices into the moments in which you make them.

It feels great knowing that you can act freely as long as you acknowledge, in writing, what you used that Freedom for on this particular day