What is up? And welcome to Working Hard, Hardly Working. For those of you who might not have listened to the podcast before, when I started this, I wanted it to be all about curating stories from a range of guests. But this year, we're not just levelling up the guests. We're revamping the solo episodes too. I have a nerdy obsession with knowing more about random things and theories, so I've given myself an excuse to spend hours researching the topics I wish I knew more about. Let's get into today's topic, the habit theory that changed mine and probably everyone you've seen on Instagram's life. First of all, let's talk about the context of habit theory. What activities do you do every day without fail? You might start thinking of the obvious, brushing your teeth, drinking water, eating lunch.

Maybe you're thinking about the habits that you want to break, like checking social media in the evenings or snoozing your alarm. Whilst these small habits may not seem like they make much of a difference to your day, if you want to make a change in your life, it is these small daily actions, not the big changes, that make a difference. Habit theory has been around for decades decades, but it's really exploded in recent years. Most of this can be pinned to a game changing book by James Clear titled Atomic Habits. You've probably heard of it before. In the book, James Clear says that your identity is quite literally made up of your actions. So you're defined by what you do. So if you want to change your identity to, say, become more successful or productive or to be a better friend, it's easy, but it's not just a shift in your mindset.

You need to distill it into daily actions. Claire's idea that a lack of clarity is often mistaken for a lack of motivation. And that most of the time, the reason we fail to reach our goals isn't because we can't be bothered but because we haven't turned our goals into achievable, trackable habits. My favorite quote from the book is, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Goal setting means absolutely nothing if there's no system related to it that will help you actually achieve that goal. A goal is a wish without a system, basically. There's decades of science behind Clear's theory, so let's get into the actual data.

Studies have shown that up to 43% of our daily actions are habits. So it makes sense that shifting them would have a huge impact on your life. The idea behind Clear's theory is very simple, and the headline is that you've got to focus on shifting your habits so you're getting 1% better every day. Improving by 1% sometimes isn't even noticeable. But here's the maths. If you can get 1% better each day for 1 year, you'll end up 37 times better by the time you're done. This doesn't sound like a lot. However, 37 times better is not 37% better.

It's 3,700 percent better because of exponential growth. To give an example of this, if you started the year with a £100 and you were able to increase that by 1% every day, by the end of the year, you would have £3,778. So you wouldn't just have £100 plus £365 because of the exponential growth. This is how much your life can improve. Conversely, if you get 1% worse each day for 1 year, you'll decline nearly down to 0. So what starts as a small win or, on the other hand, a minor setback can actually accumulate into something much, much more. And this is backed up by business studies too. According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, companies that integrate small, consistent improvements into their daily operations are 30% more likely to see substantial growth over time.

So it's not just something for your routine but to apply to every element of your life and work. Start thinking about this every day in everything you're doing, whether it is a skill, whether it is a habit. I promise you, it will change your whole perception. There is a lot of psychology behind this. And in order to understand it, we need to understand the habit loop. In the 19 nineties, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decoded the structure of habits. They coined the idea of a habit loop to describe the neurological patterns that are the basis of all of our routines. The loop consists of 4 parts.

Cue, craving, response, and reward. Let's go through each stage together. Number 1. This is the cue. The cue is what triggers your brain to initiate a habit. If you think of your brain like a sniffer dog that's always searching for a dopamine hit, the cue is its first whiff of reward. This could be a primary reward linked to a survival instinct like food or water or it could be a secondary reward we've evolved to want like money, power, fame, approval, love, or satisfaction. Number 2 is the craving.

If your cue is your first hint that you could get a reward, the craving is the natural response to that hint. James Clear puts it brilliantly when he says that cravings are the motivational force behind every habit. So without some sort of motivation, we wouldn't have any reason to do any action. And what we crave isn't the habit, but the reward that habit delivers. A good example of this is you don't want to switch the light on. You want to be able to see in the dark. So you're not motivated by turning on the TV, but the promise of entertainment wants you do. Your specific thoughts, feelings, and emotions are what transform a cue into a craving.