How to make good habits, why we are wired to believe ‘working hard’ is a virtue and learning the power of opposites fuel creative thinking

3 minute read

Friday Thoughts & Learnings

This week I've been reading the work of James Clear in his book Atomic Habits to learn his strategies of how to create change and make it stick. I've watched a TED talk from Azim Shariff, a Canadian university professor, who has discovered why we value 'working hard' over achieving results. And I've been learning how inversion strategies have been used by artists, musicians and entrepreneurs to solve big problems. Enjoy.

How to make good habits

Atomic Habits by James Clear shows how small, repeated changes lead to remarkable results.  Since its release in 2018 it's sold over 1 million copies. 

His framework for change: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy and make it satisfying offers plenty of practical strategies and tips to help make the habits of change easier to start and harder to break.

If you're searching for inspiration to make changes for your self or your organisation, I recommend checking it out.

Why we are wired to believe ‘working hard’ is a virtue

Does working hard really make you a good person, Azim Shariff

Azim, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, has found we have deeply engrained societal biases that link hard work to morality, even when that work has no purpose or value.

He explains how when we see a person working long hours, even if they are doing things that don’t add value or take another person half as long to complete, we are conditioned to think they are highly moral.  

And this bias is universal across cultures. 

This mindset differs for entrepreneurs whose perspective is to value outcomes over effort because it leverages their time to achieve more.

If our conversations focus more on what we want the outcome to be and celebrate creativity, ingenuity and learning from how it was approached, perhaps we can shift the cultural dial towards valuing being smarter and not just working harder?

The power of opposites fuel creative thinking

Inversion is a thinking strategy where you purposely look at a problem or start seeing things from the opposite perspective.

And it can apply in any situation. 

James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits, shares: “Where hair metal bands like Poison and Def Leppard spent millions to produce and promote each record, Nirvana recorded Nevermind for $65,000.  Where hair metal was flashy, Nirvana was stripped-down and raw.”  It was the opposite of what people at the time were buying, and it spawned a new genre of music.

In 1979, Andy Warhol started his Reversals series, where he inverted his best-known artworks, including portraits of Marylyn Monroe, turning light areas into dark and shadows into colour resulting in a visually striking re-interpretations which were a major commercial success.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, is a big fan of inversion. He says: “Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backwards. Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead–through sloth, envy, resentment, self-pity, entitlement, all the mental habits of self-defeat.  Avoid these qualities and you will succeed.”

Another example of inversion is how entrepreneur Colin Grant used this strategy to save his microbrewery from going out of business. Instead of selling his beer to pubs, he said "why don't you buy your beer from me". His solution to beat intense competition and high churn rates was to provide custom created beers, sold to bars under their labels.

You can read the full story here: Selling Beer ‘Upside Down’.

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