Transcription

Transcription by ESO. Translation by — Welcome, everyone. Before I introduce myself, I want to share with you an interesting story. For around 100 years, no British cyclist has ever won the Tour de France. But don't worry, gentle citizens of the United Kingdom, this story ends with a happy ending. Thanks to this guy, Dave Brailsford. And in 2003, he was appointed the performance director of the British Cycling Organization. And only five years since he was appointed, in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, British cyclists actually won 60% of all gold medals. And in the following London Olympics, they fared even better. Not only that, between 2013 and 2017, five out of the six winners of the Tour de France were British. So how come this remarkable turnaround from average professional cyclists to world champions? Dave and his team set out to deploy a strategy called the Accumulation of Tiny Achievements. They broke down how to ride a bike into the small factors, a lot of small factors, and they set out to achieve 1% improvement in each one of them. And the idea was that the accumulation of the effect of all these changes would be enormous. For instance, they set out to find the most comfortable seats to ride on for the cyclists. They rubbed special alcohol on the tires to improve road grip. They researched what is the best massage gel to relieve aching muscles. They even invited a doctor to give out a talk about how to properly wash your hands and improve the habits of better hygiene in order to reduce the amount of catching the common cold by the cyclists. So how is all of this cycling story related to us as developers? So I've been a developer for almost 20 years now, and I'm Nathan Solonitsky, and I'm a backend infrastructure tech lead at Wix. And I would consider myself a pretty curious person. So around nine years ago when I started working at Wix, they gave me the opportunity to really improve my personal and professional growth by subscribing to audiobooks, and I took it on and listened to a lot of them, stuff like The 7 Habits of Effective People, and I also delved into mindfulness and meditation. And then I stumbled upon this book, Atomic Habits, Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results, by James Clear. And it really transformed the way I apply changes into my daily routines. And the cycling story by the British cyclists is part of this book. By the way, don't worry, I put the slides on SlideShare, and I'll give out the link at the end. So you can, of course, photograph if you want, but you don't have to. Now, I really recommend for you to read this book, and maybe add it to your reading list if you have one. But even if you don't, I think, I hope that by the end of this talk, you will be motivated to start doing, employing a new habit in your life, and maybe become the developer that you want to be. Now, during my career, I discussed development goals by developers from a lot of different backgrounds and teams. And they shared goals like, yeah, I want to be part of a fan company, like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and, of course, Microsoft. Others said, oh, you know what I really want to be? I want to be a famous creator of a very successful open-source project. Maybe similar to these guys. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and Git, or James Gosling, the creator of Java. But setting such goals, while can give you a certain direction, it's important not to be completely driven by them. Oh, I need to complete and achieve this goal. Because, well, frankly, there is no guarantee that you will ever achieve it, right? And even if you do, let's say you do achieve the goal, it will only give you some momentary satisfaction, and then you'll say, okay, that's nice. What is the next goal? What is the next goal? So it's like a rat race, right? So the idea also from this book is to avoid focusing solely on goals and to prefer systems. The idea here is to achieve long-term happiness and fulfillment, not by thinking about goals constantly, but by focusing on small changes to make the most of every single day. And this way we improve our system of operation. Because if we focus on changing our habits, and we are creatures of habits, we won't only achieve one goal. We'll actually achieve a lot of different goals throughout our lifetime. Now, for me, I want to set out to be a good developer, right? A better developer, improve all the time. So for this talk, I want to focus on two new habits that I wanted at the time to employ for myself. The first is learning new tech skills. The idea here is because I'm a curious person, I think it will really fit me to become a lifelong learner and improve my skills all the time. And also I have trouble focusing from time to time. So it's important for me to be able to easily get into coding flow and avoid distractions while coding. So hopefully by sharing my journey of getting these habits, you will find inspiration for yourself to choose the habit that you prefer to become the developer that you want to be. But before we dive into how I created these habits, first let's talk about what exactly is a habit. So each and every habit has four stages. And these stages happen in the same order for each and every one of our habits. We start off with a cue. And I will provide explanation for these stages along with an example so you will understand better. So one of the easier examples to follow is, of course, checking up on our phone notifications, right? Everyone does it. So a cue is a signal to our brain that something has happened that we want to respond to and perform some action. So what will be the cue when there's a notification on the phone? You will probably get some sound notification or maybe a light will flash. And then you immediately get the signal to your brain. And the next stage will be craving, right? We want to do something that will pleasure our brain. So we get a craving. What will be the craving for checking up notifications? Well, of course, we want to make sure that we're not missing anything important. You know, FOMO is a really, really strong and powerful emotion. And then we have, of course, the response, the actual performance of the action of the habit. And in our example case, we will pick up the phone and check up all the notifications. And then we will get the reward. Dopamine will rush into our brain. And we checked up all notifications. The world has not collapsed. We can feel good with ourselves and move on with our day. OK, cool. So these are the four stages. Now, how would you set up to build a good habit? Well, you need to ask yourself the following questions for each stage. For the cue, you want to ask, how do I make this cue obvious? So it will be obvious for me that I want to perform the new habit. And for the craving part, you need to ask yourself how to make it attractive. Because the more attractive it is, the better the chances that you will actually perform it. And also, crucially, the question of how to make it easy. Because if it will be difficult, it will be harder for us to gain this new habit. And finally, for the reward, we want to make it as satisfying as possible. We want to get that dopamine rush. OK, so I wanted to set out to learn new tech skills as a habit, a continuous, lifelong habit. So how do I make that obvious? Well, how do I make it such that I will perform this habit when I commute to work? The idea for this rule is to set specific implementation intentions. I will do this behavior at this time in that location. So in my case, I will listen to engineering books and podcasts in the morning on my commute. So I have a plan in place which is very, very specific. It's not something abstract. And when I get into my car, then I get the cue to play up the podcast or the audio book. And another very powerful rule here, which is to stack your habits. So like I said, we are creatures of habit. We have a lot of different habits that we have throughout the day. So you can choose one of your existing habits and just attach the new habit after it. So I have a dog and I attached a new habit to it. After I walk my dog in working days, I will sit down and do a coat cutter. And that way we have the trigger for the new habit relying on a well-defined habit in our brain. Also, very, very importantly, pair the context. We mentally assign our habits to the locations where they occur. And that's why I will never do a learning session in my living room. Because the living room is where I relax with my partner and we watch some silly TV show. It won't be conductive for me as a place to do some new learning. For that, I say, okay, I have a desk where I work at home. That's where I will do my learning sessions, not in the living room. And that was a key insight for me as well. Cool. So we got the trigger down. We got the cue. Now, how do we make the actual action a lot more attractive? Well, one way is to learn with a colleague. So the rule here is join a culture that reinforces good habits. Because behaviors are attractive when they help us fit in. So in my case, I want to get a behavior for learning tech skills in a community or with some colleagues. Well, thankfully, at Wix, we have several guild days each week where we listen to lectures and do some workshops from time to time. And it's like, of course, I will come and join it because all of my colleagues and friends are doing it. So that's a cue for me that if I do it, I'm part of the group and I fit in. So it's a very powerful psychological emotion that we want to be part of the group. So we will do this learning together. And also quite nice temptation bundling. After the habit I need, I will do the habit that I really want. So if you really enjoy taking coffee breaks with your colleagues and chitchatting, you really like that. Great. Just make sure that you do the learning session right before that, because once you do that, you are allowed to go and do the habit that you want and take that coffee break. Cool. So we're making our new learning skills habits much more attractive. Now, how to make it easy. And this is a crucial step that sometimes people are not aware of that and it needs careful thinking about. So we're talking about the two minute rule. Always stay below the point where it feels like work. Now, I can sit down and say, OK, I'll start reading a book. I'll start listening to it. And then when I'm bored or when I'm no longer want to, I'll finish doing that and do something else. Right. What's the big deal? Well, that's a commitment like, oh, but I don't really have time for it today. I'll do it tomorrow. That's OK. When you have this thinking, everyone does it, me included. It's really hard to achieve what you want because it sounds difficult. Right. We have work. We have kids. We have our daily modern stresses. But you can always find two minutes. So I wrote here, listen to one book chapter at a time. But you can also say, listen to two minutes at a time. But you may say to yourself, what? Two minutes? What will I gain from that? It's nothing. Right. What you will gain for that is a lifelong habit. After a month or two. I think that you won't stay at two minutes anymore, but your brain is already wired. The lanes are already there in order to do this habit at the point of time that we talked about with the cue before. So really try and make it easy with a small time window that that makes it a lot more possible. Also important is to reduce friction here. The idea is to minimize the actions that you need to take in order to start doing the new habit. So for me, it means downloading the engineering podcast episodes in advance. So when I get into my car for my daily commute, I just click play. I don't need to wait. Which podcast will I listen to today? Oh, and I need to download it. Let me choose. No, it's straight there. Top of the list. Click play and be about your day. So reduce the friction. It will make it easier for you to achieve your habit. And also design your environment to make good habits easy. Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do. So if I want the desk at my home to be a conductive learning environment, I need to make sure that it's decluttered. And the book that I want to read about Java 21 is front and center there. So it will make my environment easier for me to just pick it up and start working and start learning. Right. Great. So we try to make it really easy and simple to to actually do the action of the habit. And the final stage here is how do we make it satisfying? Right. So we keep going, keep going. So for me, it's about sharing what I learned with my colleagues. Create immediate reward. What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided. Share what you learned with your colleagues. So for me, it means we used to be a long time in Scala. We're moving to Java now. But each time I learned something new that I wasn't aware of, so fun in Scala, I shared it on the slacks on our organization's Slack channel for Scala. And then I got to be like, oh, yeah, that's a great feature. You know, it reminds me of that. Are you aware of that? And I wasn't aware of that. And there's like a discussion going. And it's really fun and rewarding to to share, share with people. And and then you get like positive feedback and it's just a lot more fun. Another critical rule is actually comes from games, right? A habit tracker. Start tracking and keep your habit streak alive. Maybe some of you, is anyone here used Duolingo in the past? Right. So Duolingo always keeps saying continue, start a habit streak, give you more gems or something. And and then like I said, oh, you haven't you haven't did your learning session today. You're going to lose your habit streak. You're going to lose your weekly streak. Maybe you want to do that before the day ends. So the idea here is like we want to keep the streak alive. We want to keep our our beings alive in the game. Right. So in terms of learning a new tech skills, the idea here is to write a simple journal in our phones or in our laptops and track the days in which I've listened to the engineering podcast on my commute. And then like I did it for Monday to Thursday. No reason why I shouldn't do it on Friday as well. Keep that streak going. OK, so we talked about how to create a good habit. Now, something that is a bit more challenging and that's breaking a bad habit. It's more challenging because it's really hardwired into our brain, the bad habit. Right. So what are the rules and the questions regarding the four stages for a bad habit? Well, it's basically the flip side. You need to ask yourself how to make the new the old bad habit invisible. So you don't get a trigger to your brain to actually perform it. And then you need to ask yourself how to make it as unattractive as possible so you won't get the craving. Right. Then third stage, how to make performing it more difficult. And then you won't actually perform it because it's so difficult. I don't have the time and break the bad habit. And of course, finally, how to make it unsatisfying. So you won't get that dopamine rush and you don't get the reward. So, like I mentioned before, for me, like from time to time, I have trouble focusing. And it was really important for me to getting to the coding flows, avoiding distractions. Like we have distractions all day long and just doing it. Right. So how to make the trigger of some distraction invisible? Well, it's quite simple, actually. Block notifications. In our phones and our laptops and desktops, it's really easy to set up. No, no notifications at all. So you reduce the exposure to the bad habits. Hiding a cue is a good way to eliminate existing bad habits. If I don't get a notification from social media, from a news site, for my co-workers, then I won't get distracted. It's very simple. You just need to actually employ the rules. OK, now how to make the bad habit unattractive. So in my case, I want to not miss the deadline. What do I mean by that? Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit. Highlight the benefits makes it seem unattractive. So I needed to think about what will be the benefits of avoiding these distractions. Well, it's quite simple. I will be more productive. I will do my tasks faster and my managers will be more pleased with me. And maybe I'll get the promotion I wanted quicker. So the idea here is to think about the benefits of not doing the bad habit and making it more unattractive. What about making it more difficult? Well, when I thought about it, I thought, how can I avoid actually going on a social media site or social media app? So thankfully, there are a lot of apps and Chrome extensions and stuff like that that allow you to block social media apps and sites during work hours. So whenever I went on a social media site, I got this popped up. No way, Jose. So you get a clear visualization. Oh, right. What am I doing? It was automatic for me that the code was compiling and I'm going to social media. But wait. No, I want to stop with this bad habit. And if I want to avoid getting this window, I need to go and set up. And it's like it's a few stages to avoid getting this window. So this brings me to the commitment device, right? A choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. So my present self, which is relaxed, is saying, Nathan, you're going to be you're going to be distracted when in your code session. Then put up these rules, apply them, and you won't regret it. I tell you, I'm telling my future self. And it actually worked. I got the screen and said, OK, let's come back. OK, the code is compiling. But let me think. Let me write down what is the next step I want to do. What after the code compile or maybe I'll switch over to tests for now, but not social media. OK, and the last thing here for breaking bad habits is to make it as unsatisfying as possible. So here, each time that I was distracted, a lot of work and didn't complete my tests, I decided that I'm going to share that with my partner. So I did here is an accountability partner, someone who keeps you accountable. And of course, it's someone who cares about you. And then you said, tell them, please ask me if today how it went. And it's like with an AA sponsor, right? The AA sponsor tries to be your friend, guide you and keep you on the wagon. So you really don't want to upset the sponsor. You don't want to upset your partner and make them feel like you let down yourself and them. So it makes it harder for you to actually do the thing that you're trying to avoid. And another trick is a habit contract, a penalty if you fall off the habit wagon. So you can publish on social media, but not during work hours, that if I will browse social media more than a few minutes in working hours every day, I will pay a one hundred dollar fine to a charity and specify the charity. So it's it sound like very mechanical. But if you publish it to the world, they like the world would probably want to keep you accountable. Or you can also get your people that are close to you, like family and friends, to also hold you accountable for these penalties. OK, so let's summarize for the Q stage, we want to have specific intention. Think about the time and place and what you want to do in order to create the new habit. And so it's it's it's important to plan ahead. Right. Don't say, OK, I'm starting a new habit tomorrow. OK, but when, where? These are important questions. Stack your habits, a really powerful tool to make sure that you utilize your existing strong habits in your brain and pair them with the new habit that you want to create. Pair the context. I'm not doing learning sessions in my living room. It's just it's not going to work. I need to pair it to my daily commute or to my work desk. And the flip side, how do we make the Q invisible for bad habits? Reduce the exposure to them, right? Stop getting notifications on your phone or maybe even uninstall these apps altogether. OK, so about craving, how do we make the good habit more attractive? Join a culture. We all want to fit in to groups. It's part of our evolutionary psychology. So join a group that is like minded on on this new habit. Temptation bundling. You really like to do something? Well, you can do it after you perform the new habit. And the flip side, how to make it unattractive? Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit. If I stop this bad habit, maybe I get the promotion quicker. And about the response again, so reduce friction, make it easy and really easy, like download podcasts in advance and set one, two, three. This this is the order in advance so that you come and you just hit play. Downscale big habits. The two minute rule. Critical thing. It sounds mechanical, but if you keep at it, it means it will be easy for you to be consistent with that. Design your environment. Declutter environments and make sure that they are suitable for your place where you can easily perform the new habit. And the flip side, the commitment device. Find an accountability partner that will hold you accountable so that you won't relapse. And finally, how to make the habit a lot more rewarding. Get an immediate reward. Share your accomplishments with your friends. Track your habits so that you won't want to stop your habit streak. And how to make the bad habit unsatisfying. Find out the accountability partner or publish to the world that you have this intention. And if you relapse, you will pay that fine to charity. OK, cool. So how to summarize. Setting up the goals is not enough. Like I said, goals, set up goals is nice. But you want to focus on your day to day, your daily routines, on your systems, on your habits. Focus on that. How to improve like one percent each day. And these tiny habits that you will accumulate over a long period will absolutely lead to big gains. And you'll be able to fulfill a lot of different goals. So, yeah, I hope I motivated you today to start thinking about which habit you want to start with or break a bad one. And it doesn't have to be about becoming a better developer. It can be anything in your life. And so I hope you took something from this talk. And, yeah, enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you very much.