"We are inviting you to counsel with the Lord about how you can grow in a balanced way.
... You can do hard things." — President Russell M. Nelson 

IN PURSUIT OF GROWTH

We are not born into this world with fixed habits. Neither do we inherit a noble character. Instead, as children of God, we are given the privilege and opportunity of choosing which way of life we will follow — which habits we will form. — Elder Delbert L. Stapley 

Turning a Video Game Addiction into Goals

Steve Kamb was a lifelong video game aficionado. An addict, even. He worried about how much of his life he was losing to the escapist pleasures of gaming. Then it occurred to him that he might be able to hijack his own addiction. if he could understand why he found games so compelling, he could use those same principles to rebuild his life "around the adventure rather than escape." . . . h described the structure of games. They follow a system of levels: “When you are Level 1 and killing spiders, you know that when you kill enough spiders, you get to level up eventually and get to start attacking rats. Once you advance to a high enough level, you know you get to start slaying FREAKING DRAGONS (which can only be written in all caps).”

Conquering each level feels good. It feels so good, in fact, that you can love playing a game even if you never finish it. Think of it: Very few people finish Angry Birds or Candy Crush or (for that matter) Donkey Kong, but still they have  great time playing.

Kamb’s insight was that, in our lives, we tend to declare goals without intervening levels. We declare that we’re going to “learn to play the guitar.” We take a lesson or two, buy a cheap guitar, futz around with simple chords for a few weeks. Then life gets busy, and seven years later, we find the guitar in the attic and think, I should take up that guitar again. There are no levels.

Kamb had always loved Irish music and had fantasized about learning to play the fiddle. So he co-opted gaming strategy and figured out a way to “level up” toward his goal:

LEVEL 1: Commit to one violin lesson per week, and practice 15 minutes per day for six months.

LEVEL 2: Relearn how to read sheet music and complete Celtic Fiddle Tunes by Craig Duncan.

LEVEL 3: Learn to play “Concerning Hobbits” for The Fellowship of the Ring on violin.

LEVEL 4: Sit and play the fiddle for 30 minutes without musicians.

LEVEL 5: Learn to play “Promontory” from The Last of the Mohicans on the violin.

BOSS BATTLE: Sit and play the fiddle for 30 minutes in a pub in Ireland.

Isn’t that ingenious? He’s taken an ambiguous goal — learning to play the fiddle — and defined an appealing destination; playing in an Irish pub. Better yet, he invented five milestones en route to the destination, each worthy of celebration. Note that, as with a game, if he stopped the guest after Level 3, he’d still have several moments of pride to remember. It would have been a fun ride, like quitting after 30 levels of Candy Crush.

Could you adapt this strategy for one of your goals? Many Americans aspire to learn another language, for example. But “learning Spanish” is one of those amorphous goals that should give us pause. There’s no destination and no intermediate levels. Using Kamb’s principles, we can make this a more exciting journey. We can level up:

LEVEL 1: Order a meal in Spanish

LEVEL 2: Have a simple conversation in Spanish with a taxi driver.

LEVEL 3: Glance at a Spanish newspaper and understand at least one headline.

LEVEL 4: Follow the action in a Spanish cartoon.

LEVEL 5: Read a kindergarten-level book in Spanish.

And so on, leading up to . . .

DESTINATION: Be able to have full, normal conversations in Spanish with Fernando in accounting (not just Cómo Está Usted?”)

Compare that with the typical way we think about pursuing goals:

LEVEL 1: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

LEVEL 2: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

LEVEL 3: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

LEVEL 4: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

LEVEL 5: Try to squeeze in a Spanish study session.

Which of those plans sound like more fun? Which are you more likely to return to, if you’re forced to take a break? Which are you more likely to complete?

By using Kamb’s level-up strategy, we multiply the number of motivating milestones we encounter en route to a goal. That’s a forward-looking strategy: We’re anticipating moments of pride ahead. But the opposite is also possible to surface those milestones you’ve already met but might not have noticed. . . . We are consistently missing opportunities to create moments of pride for ourselves and others. The interesting question is, Why?  (The Power of Moments, 162-165)

Shawn Achor - the 20 Second Rule

Harvard happiness researcher Shawn Achor has some very good news for you: Laziness may be the key to breaking bad habits and building positive ones—and all it takes is 20 seconds.

Habits, good or bad, begin with willpower. . . . Achor recounts his trouble building a habit of practicing guitar after a long day’s work. He knew that practicing would make him happier and more fulfilled by the end of a short session—but the 20 seconds of effort it would take to remove his guitar from the closet and return to the living room proved to be a major mental barrier. After a few days of forcing himself to play, he couldn’t make the habit stick; he just perceived it as too much of a pain. Twenty seconds of annoyance was all it took for Shawn to convince himself that the great rewards of playing guitar were not worth the minor effort.

We can blame our weary brains for this shortsightedness. Like a gas tank we fill first thing in the morning, our brains burn willpower throughout the day until we’re left running on fumes (it’s a phenomenon called “decision fatigue”). As Shawn point out in his popular TED talk on happiness (one of the most viewed of all time), the problem is not with our hectic lives, but with our perception of them—90 percent of a person’s long-term happiness is linked to how they view the world, not what their external world actually looks like. Knowing this, could perception be altered to make good habits easier to forge, and bad habits easier to break? The answer, happily, is yes. Find out how long it takes to break a habit.

Shawn’s solution was simple: Remove that 20 seconds of effort keeping him from picking up his guitar. He bought a $2 stand, moved the guitar from the closet to the living room, and left it in immediate reach. Three weeks later, he had practiced 21 days in a row.

“What I had done here, essentially, was put the desired behavior on the path of least resistance, so it actually took less energy and effort to pick up and practice the guitar than to avoid it,” Shawn writes in his book. “I like to refer to this as the 20-Second Rule, because lowering the barrier to change by just 20 seconds was all it took to help me form a new life habit.”

Armed with this knowledge of his own habits, Shawn turned this same 20-second logic to his negative habits, and found the same results: Making negative activities 20 seconds harder to carry out made them less desirable, and therefore easier to cut out of his life.

Determined to break his habit of turning on the TV as soon as he got home at the end of the day, Shawn removed the batteries from his remote control and stored them in another room. “The next few nights when I got home from work, I plopped down on the couch and pressed the ‘on’ button on the remote—usually repeatedly—forgetting that I had moved the batteries,” he writes. “Sure enough, the energy and effort required to retrieve the batteries—or even to walk across the room and turn the TV on manually—was enough to do the trick.”

How can you apply the 20-second rule to your own life? Think of a habit you’d like to break, then think of what is allowing you to so easily indulge in it. Move that bag of Doritos to the top shelf of the cupboard, accessible only by the stool you keep in the other room. . . .  Remove social media apps from your phone, or download an app that limits off-task Internet browsing.

As for forming good habits, it all starts with perception. Going to the gym, for example, will always take more than 20 seconds—but putting on your running shoes won’t. Refocus your willpower onto that first task (usually as simple as getting off the couch) instead of the mentally-fatiguing end result, and you will soon find yourself making smarter decisions, 20 seconds at a time.