Reading Duhigg’s book taught me that if you really want to change, the best thing you can do is choose which habits to acquire and which to get rid of and then go about doing that. To help you, I recommend that you write down your three most harmful habits. Do that right now. Now pick one of those habits and be committed to breaking it. Can you do that? That would be extraordinarily impactful. If you break all three, you will radically improve the trajectory of your life. Or you can pick habits that you want to acquire and then acquire them.

The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections. If you can acquire this habit yourself, you will learn what causes your pain and what you can do about it, and it will have an enormous impact on your effectiveness.

Train your “lower-level you” with kindness and persistence to build the right habits. I used to think that the upper-level you needed to fight with the lower-level you to gain control, but over time I’ve learned that it is more effective to train that subconscious, emotional you the same way you would teach a child to behave the way you would like him or her to behave—with loving kindness and persistence so that the right habits are acquired.

Understand the differences between right-brained and left-brained thinking. Just as your brain has its conscious upper part and its subconscious lower part, it also has two halves called hemispheres.30 You might have heard it said that some people are more left-brained while others are more right-brained. That’s not just a saying—Caltech professor Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering it. In a nutshell:

The left hemisphere reasons sequentially, analyzes details, and excels at linear analysis. “Left-brained” or “linear” thinkers who are analytically strong are often called “bright.”
