Implement New Habits

How to do What we Know we "Should"

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Jan 14, 2025

Ethan & Jason here—let’s raise the heat for the New Year! Welcome to this week’s *free article* of Level Up: Your source for executive insights, high performance habits, and specific career growth actions.

Three FYIs:

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High performers find ways to make daily habits out of hard things that others put off.

Here’s an advanced lesson in how to do this.

Smokers know they "should" quit but most do not.
Many struggle to eat right or exercise, though they "know better."
At work, we all put off some tasks we know we should do.

These are not knowledge problems (we know what we should do).

They are process and habit problems.

All these tasks (stopping smoking, working out, long term learning at work...) share the trait that they are important (they have high value) but not urgent (on any given day the consequences of putting them off to tomorrow are small).

The result is, we often promise ourselves we will get to them while actually delaying them far too long for our own good.

The most successful people find ways to routinely do more of the critical tasks that others avoid.

Discipline is great and it can work very short term.

But it is rarely a sustainable solution as it is too draining.

A client of mine shared a good example of doing this that we can adapt and apply.

He is a manager who needed to learn a new technology.

He put himself onto his Oncall Rotation as a forcing function.

This approach leverages several key tricks:

It allocates scheduled time (when he is oncall) to the task he can otherwise put off.
It removes his ability to easily delegate to others (because many issues come in at night or on the weekend, when the easy safety valve of pushing work to his team is not available).
It creates urgency in a task (learn the new technology) that is otherwise important but not urgent during the midweek work hours.
It creates social cover to push the daily barrage of "urgent" work aside. No one questions you skipping a meeting or delaying a report when you are "oncall for a customer outage."

The trick is to make a commitment you cannot escape ahead of time:

You make the commitment when you do not feel the price of following through.
Then when you want out of the work later, it is too late and you have trapped yourself.

My examples:

I decided my top priority for the day during my commute, when I could not work on it or anything else. Then, when I got to work, knowing my top priority helped me resist less important work others were pushing me to do first.
I use a personal trainer. By paying someone and scheduling time, I then am unwilling to shirk my workout. Left to myself, I do not go to the gym.
I wish I could use Duolingo to learn a language. Going to the country where I have to use the language to get by works far better.

If you want to go deeper on how to implement new habits, watch my 65-minute Career Talk where I covered the thesis of “should”, how habits form, 6 actions anyone can do, and I answered pre-submitted and live questions from our Level Up Community.

While Career Talks classes are available individually for purchase ($59 each)—all are free to paid newsletter subscribers ($354 value).
One paid subscriber wrote: “I’d gladly pay for each talk…but to get all as part of the $170/yr membership price, easy no brainer.”
Become a paid subscriber here.

Here’s a 2-minute trailer of the talk.

I am still not nearly as good as I wish I was at "doing what I should."

Please share your secrets - how do you do unpleasant work you need to do?

Level Up Slack Community: What’s Happening

We have two new Slack Channels:

“Peer Mentoring” led and moderated by Lindsay Carmer (Director of Tech Operations at Walmart; ex-Amazon; ex-Chanel).
1. Problem: Employees rarely have a 'safe' space within their current companies to ask for guidance in navigating a challenging situation at work. Whether it is a challenge with managing up, leading teams, or navigating a complex domain they are responsible for.
2. Channel solution: The goal of the channel is to allow community members to submit a situation and detail the help they need. From there, a small group (1-3) of moderators or volunteers will listen, provide a diverse set of feedback for the community member to take away (15 min meeting or 1:1 in Slack). The benefit of this is the community member can be transparent about their struggles, knowledge gaps and what's blocking them. We expect to hear feedback that members are acting faster on blockers and have more confidence in their positioning.
“PathFinders” led and moderated by Tanvi Hungund (Senior Manager, Enterprise Solution Architecture at AWS — a 10 yr Amazonian).
1. Problem: Making a shift in our career path (eg: switching teams, IC to Manager, job family changes etc) can bring up a lot of uncertainty, and it’s natural to seek advice from those who’ve had similar experiences. But it can be tough to find a safe space for open conversations, especially within our own companies.
2. Channel solution: This is where we come together as a community—sharing experiences, expanding our networks, and supporting each other’s growth. Expect:
  1. Mindset Shifts: Tools and discussions to help you grow both personally and professionally.
  2. Career Guidance: Answers to your pressing career transition questions from fellow leaders and mentors.
  3. A Supportive Community: A space to connect, learn, and grow alongside other like-minded professionals in growth mode.

The response for both channels has been incredibly positive with many members volunteering to help and offering to share their own stories and advice.

This is bar raising ownership and exemplifies what it means to be a high-value community member.

(plus, it’s a great way to build a network)

We look forward to seeing the impact.

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