The Simple Formula for Change: Consistency, Intensity, Reward

Small steps, taken consistently, rewarded appropriately, improved regularly

There’s a simple formula for changing almost any aspect of your life:

(Effort + Consistency + Reward ) × Learning = Change.

People tend to set big, dramatic goals tied to big, dramatic effort. But most accomplished people don’t make extraordinary efforts, they do ordinary things for unusual periods of time. This is the opposite of what most people do, which is push too hard and give up too soon. Good normal effort is:

1. Intense enough to create change.

2. Easy enough to be committable.

Meaningful change is built from what we do day after day. The people who make those grindset videos about waking up at 4:30 AM, going straight to the gym, cold shower, 110% throughout the day, then come home and watch motivational videos? If they ever even did that in the first place, how many of them actually sustain that effort? We’ve painted an unrealistic picture of sustainable productivity; it’s more performance art than anything else.¹

Intensity moves the needle, consistency moves the mountain. If you burn out or injure yourself after a month, it’s not committable. If you need to totally reorganize your life to do it, it’s probably not committable. When people start exercising,² they often make two mistakes at the same time. They don’t do the activity very frequently, and when they do they make it too difficult. They think to themselves, “For a workout to count, I need to be at the gym for an hour working hard, doing uncomfortable things. But that sounds painful and difficult, and I need to get over this big mental hurdle every time I head to the gym, so I’m just going to do it once a week.” It’s the worst of both worlds: they’re not getting many reps, and they’re making it difficult for those reps to be enjoyable.

What’s the five-minute activity you can commit to, day after day? The five minutes of reading, writing, exercise, meditation, investing in your relationship, or doing that task you’ve been putting off forever. Just five minutes. Make it too small to fail. Most of the time what you’ll find is you start with five minutes and think, “That was easy. Why not do a little more?” Then you figure out what the right amount is for you. Five minutes becomes ten becomes twenty. Those efforts compound over time, and it’s only when you look back that you realize how far you’ve come.

Stop Trying to Punish Yourself Into Things

If you want to understand behavior, there’s a simple rule:

What’s rewarded is repeated, what’s punished is avoided.

This is the Law of Effect, and it’s as true for humans as it is for any other animal. It sounds obvious and intuitive: life is carrots and sticks. We give ourselves carrots to pull us toward the things we should do more of, and we use sticks to push ourselves away from things we should do less. But the Law of Effect is a big problem, because we often frame what we “should” do as a form of punishment. We don’t want to have that hard conversation or exercise or eat more vegetables or whatever else…but we should. We’re trying to flog ourselves up the hill, and that approach is never going to yield the consistency that creates real change.

The way most people approach change is backwards. For years I set goals that sounded something like this, “You know, it would be great if Forrest did all these useful things: if he woke up earlier, played fewer video games, and went to the gym more often.”³ The tone was critical and punishing. There’s nothing enjoyable or meaningful I was trying to motivate myself toward, just a list of things I enjoyed I was taking away. I was trying to make myself embrace the stick and run away from the carrot. Then I woke up on February 3rd and wondered why I hadn’t made any progress toward my resolutions.

It’s remarkable how brutal people are with themselves; I’ve found ways to self-punish even when I did the good thing. I’d go to the gym, work hard, put the effort in, and still feel terrible before, during, and after. “I didn’t do it for as long as I should have, I probably looked dumb, what am I doing, nothing ever gets better, this is a waste of time.” Even after taking the first step - the hardest one to take - we feed ourselves a diet of self-criticism. It’s no wonder we’re demotivated.

We need to move away from a change model that’s based on self-criticism toward something else. So, what’s the alternative? If repetition is the engine of change, what keeps that engine running? In short, rewards.

The function of that punishing voice is to keep you safe by keeping you the same. The brain does not want to change, and if we want to adopt a behavior we need to get the brain on our team. This means figuring out how to make that behavior worth repeating for the brain. We do this by finding aspects of it that are rewarding before, during, and after doing it. There are many ways to do this: how does this behavior connect to your values? How can you notice the authentically enjoyable parts of doing hard things? How can you take in the good and maximize the sense of accomplishment once the task is done? What big, shiny, aspirational object are you moving toward? How does this step bring you closer to what you care about?

This is how we move from a punishment mindset to a pursuit mindset. Running away from something and running toward something can land you at the same destination, but the journey feels very different.

Learning About Learning

As we apply these ideas - finding a level of effort you can commit to, emphasizing day-after-day consistency, and focusing on the reward aspects of an experience - cool things start to happen. We get through the initial wall of awful, book a few wins, and begin to experience more natural motivation. Behavioral activation is one of the most powerful forces in psychology: motivation follows action, not the other way around. We don’t start motivated, we get motivated. When you have a 12-week streak going, you really want to keep that streak.

Give effort, repeat it, reward it, and it’s hard not to get better at whatever you’re doing. Getting better feels good, you start to see returns from that effort, and finding the rewards becomes easier and easier. Every repetition teaches you something. But here’s how we turbo charge the whole process: by getting better at improving the quality of those repetitions, and maximizing the learning we do along the way.

There is an enormous amount of research on learning (friends of the podcast Brad Stulberg and David Epstein are excellent sources on these topics), and you’ll find some points in common across many different domains. Whether it’s athletes or musicians or meditators, the practice habits of elite performers tend to have four things in common. They:

1. Are very consistent.

2. Find the right level of difficulty.

3. Have frequent cycles of high-quality feedback.

4. Embrace “don’t know mind.”

We’ve already talked about consistency, so let’s focus on the next ones. There’s a concept in exercise science called rate of perceived exertion (RPE), which is a way to measure how intense an activity is. A 10 is maximum effort, a 1 is a bit more effort than lying on the couch. This is often used to calibrate how many reps someone has “left in the tank” - a 10 means you’ve done the maximum possible number of reps, a 9 means maybe one rep left before you hit failure, 8 means two reps left, and so on. Most good workouts are between a 6 - 9 on the RPE scale.

This takes us back to what I was saying at the beginning of this article. Good effort lives in the Goldilocks zone - not so hard you’re overwhelmed, but hard enough to make it meaningful. This is consistent with the research on flow from psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who found that flow states were more likely to emerge when a person’s skill was appropriately matched to the challenges they were facing. Flow is characterized by a feeling of great absorption, fulfillment, and skill where self-consciousness falls away. When a task is either too difficult or too easy, we tend to concentrate on it more than we would normally, which increases self-consciousness. This self-consciousness then makes it difficult to perform at our best. The better we get at picking tasks, habits, and goals that are well-matched to our current level of skill, the more likely we are to experience competency.

So how do we find the right level of difficulty? By taking small bites, and ramping things up as we go.

Most people take bites that are far too big, then get mad at themselves when they aren’t able to chew and swallow. The gold standard workout programs for beginners recommend starting with no weight on the bar, even if you can move it fairly easily. Early sessions focus on technique, and you get to feel like you’re absolutely crushing it from the very beginning. If you increase the weight by just 5lbs per workout it only takes a few weeks to start moving real weight, and you accomplish that while improving technique, reducing injury risk, and identifying the appropriate level of difficulty.

Think about how you might apply this approach to different areas of your life. Let’s go back to the beginning of this post: if you’ve struggled to build any kind of practice, from meditation to learning the guitar, could you start with committing to just one minute a day? If you increase the amount of time you’re spending each day by just a minute, you’re doing 20 minutes a day in just a few weeks. Make it too easy to fail, and then increase the difficulty slowly until you’ve found the optimal level of challenge.

Okay, so we’ve dialed in consistency and difficulty, how do we keep on getting better? One of the best ways to learn quickly is by shortening the iterative cycle: how long it takes to go from version A to a meaningfully different version B. We define a small unit of work → run the rep → review → make one tweak → repeat. It’s easy enough to see how this applies to developing a physical skill like playing the piano or lifting a weight, but it can be a bit harder to figure out how to apply this principle to more amorphous skills like personal development. The key concepts here are:

1. Active engagement with the experience.

2. Shortening the distance between action and signal.

We’re not sleepwalking through whatever it is that we’re doing, we’re participating with it. We’re curious about it. We’re doing it as best we can right now. Then, rather than just doing the same thing over and over, we’re approaching it like a scientist. What did we do, how did it go, what can we change in the future? The trick is to keep the unit of work pretty small - musicians don’t play through the whole five minute piece to practice a single 20-second section - and focus on changing one thing at a time. Make the change, try it again, see what happens. Long feedback loops delay learning and sap motivation; short, high-quality loops let you adjust while the experience is still vivid.

In order to receive feedback, we need to be open to the possibility that we don’t know it all. As we move through life we acquire information, and while that learning has a lot of benefits it comes with a big downside: there’s a tradeoff with flexibility. As we develop some proficiency we become more attached to our way of thinking and being in the world. We lose beginner’s mind.

I used to be a pretty rigid person, in part because I had developed an identity built around being “the one who knew the answer.” My self-worth was tied to that identity, which made it difficult to admit when, I had no idea what I was doing. We’re all carrying around a mountain of beliefs - about ourselves, other people, and the world in general. The more we think we have it figured out, the more strongly we buy into our beliefs, the harder it becomes to take in new information and change how we act. As we learn more, we need to increasingly balance it with openness to possibility, the willingness to say “You know what? I don’t know.”

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This was the second part of my (somewhat) Short Guide to a Good Life. The next one will focus on how we can fight the brain’s negativity bias, start working with it, and improve self-appraisal.

1. Morning routine videos like this one blew up six months ago.

2. I frequently use exercise as an example, not because I’m trying to convince you to exercise (although sure, that too) but because it’s a very convenient one. Most people find consistent exercise difficult, think they “should” exercise more, don’t know how to exercise well, and have an emotionally complicated relationship with their body. There’s a lot going on here. Exercise is also easy to track, has a ton of modifiable variables, and is mostly dependent on your effort. There’s not a lot of fuzz - you either went for a walk or you didn’t, and you know exactly how long you were walking for.

3. To pick an arbitrary list that is totally not relevant to me haha…ha…