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“Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.”
Charles Duhigg
I stay up late to catch up on my day and the catching up puts me further behind. The clock reads close to 1am and I’m still scrolling.
The deal I made with myself was screens off by ten.
Then ten comes and goes and I keep scrolling, keep reading, keep telling myself the next thing is the last thing.
Late off the screen means late to sleep. Late to sleep means a late start the next day. A late morning eats into the afternoon and by evening I’m behind, so I reach for the screen to catch up.
And then it’s 1am again.
Each late night makes the next late night easier and the next early night harder.
In May 1935 a stock speculator named Bill Wilson paced the lobby of Akron’s Mayflower Hotel. The business trip that brought him there collapsed and the hotel bar was open.
He drank at night, woke up sick and the only cure that worked was another drink.
For years he promised to stop and broke the promise, the same way I promise myself ten and watch it slide to 1am.
He walked past the bar to a phone booth and worked through a church directory until one call led him to another alcoholic, a surgeon named Bob Smith. The two kept the break small enough to hold: stay sober one day at a time. Their meetings grew into Alcoholics Anonymous.
In 1979 the whole United States got stuck in a loop.
Inflation hit 13 percent that year: prices climbed partly because people expected them to keep climbing. Workers asked for raises to cover next year’s prices. Companies raised prices to cover the raises.
Paul Volcker took over the Federal Reserve that August and pushed the country’s interest rates to 20 percent.
- Farmers drove tractors to Washington and blockaded the Federal Reserve building.
- Car dealers sent coffins filled with the keys of unsold cars.
- Builders mailed him two-by-fours.
He held the rates high for three years. Breaking my loop takes closing a laptop by ten.
By 1983 inflation was near 3 percent and the expectations ran in reverse: people planned on stable prices and the planning kept them stable.
Around 2010 Sears got stuck in the loop. It closed stores to save money, lost the shoppers who used those stores, then closed more stores to cover the lost sales. Around 3,400 stores became five.
In 2001 Jeff Bezos sketched the same loop running the other way on a napkin:
- Lower prices bring more customers.
- More customers attract more sellers.
- More sales spread the cost of the warehouses.
- Cheaper operations fund lower prices.
Step 4 restarts step 1.
The press calls what happened to Sears a doom loop. Bezos named his napkin sketch the flywheel. Same loop. The direction is the only difference.
Your credit card runs the same loop.
Pay the minimum and the interest compounds against you. Pay anything above the minimum and the direction flips: each extra dollar shrinks next month’s interest, which frees up more dollars, which shrink it faster.
My screen loop runs on the same kind of input: what time I get off.
Most nights I lose. One night I got off at ten.
The next morning started on time. That left slack in the evening and the slack made the next night easier to close.
Momentum works for whoever sets the direction.
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What can you cut to get your momentum pointing in the right direction?
