You don’t have free will. How to succeed despite this.

It's time to live deliberately.

🤔 Problem 

Have you noticed how often we do the same things day in and day out? 

• We wake up tired and immediately scroll through our phones, negatively impacting our sleep quality.  

• We come home from work and play the same video games every night.  

• We spend money as soon as we acquire it.  

• We watch porn during moments of boredom.  

• We skip workouts because there’s always tomorrow.  

• We promise ourselves we’ll start eating right on Monday.  

Why do we repeatedly do things that we know are bad for us? It’s because over a long enough timeline, we don’t have free will.  When we don’t live life on purpose, we become the average of our autonomous behaviors (habits).  Left to our own devices, some of us tend to self destruct.  Even worse, we never become what we could’ve been.  Nothing more painful than unrealized potential.  At least this is the story for those of us who don’t do life deliberately. 

We need to ask ourselves: once we strip away everything outside of our control, what separates those of us who succeed from those of us who don’t?  The answer is simple, but the execution is difficult: do the what you know you need to do, consistently, over a long enough timeline, and you are guaranteed success.  

The pieces at play here are antagonistic:

• We need to do the right things over a long enough time period.

• Over a long enough time period, we don’t have free will.

See the problem? It’s almost like our success is left up to chance.  

This idea of us being more like machines with probabilistic behavior, rather than free-thinking beings is an important one.  All of us want to be fit, rich, and fulfilled.  Then why can’t some of us do the things we know we need to?  One day, we hit the gym.  Another day, we allow ourselves to skip.  Over time, nothing changes.  

💡 Solution

You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

- James Clear

Two modes of consciousness

• Deliberate 

• Automatic 

We’ve all experienced both of these modes of consciousness. When we’re in this deliberate mode of consciousness, we tend to be hyper-motivated, focused, and ready to make serious changes in our lives.  Some of you may be in this mode right now.  

The problem is that we are far more often in the automatic mode of consciousness.  In this mode, our habits take over and we sort of just exist as the person we’ve been conditioned to be.  We just don’t (and biologically can’t) exist in our deliberate mode of consciousness for a long enough time to make any real impact in our lives.  And this is a problem, because we are just the cumulative result of our actions over time.  If we can figure out how to influence our behavior during automatic mode, we’ve cracked the code.  

Your probability-driven inner machine

We’ve come to the realization that:

• We don’t have free will over a long enough timeline

• If we do the right things consistently over a long enough timeline, we’re guaranteed success

• We behave like machines whose actions are rooted in probability

Thus, our goal should be to increase the probability that our autonomous inner machine will do the right things on a consistent basis.  We have to treat ourselves like the Roomba that is inefficiently brute forcing its way into every nook and cranny of an apartment as part of its cleaning strategy.  Will it clean up most of the dust in your rooms? Some days.  Other days, it’ll get some wires trapped under its wheels and make sad robot noises.  If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is how most of us live our lives.  We are that sad Roomba.  

How do we increase the probability that the Roomba finds success and fulfillment?  We can remove loose wires from the floor.  We can put magnetic tape at the boundaries of our apartment so the Roomba has clear path to route through.  We can also remove any distracting, large objects on the ground so the Roomba doesn’t keep bumping into them.  And thus, we’ve come to the most effective way to influence a probability-driven machine’s behavior towards an effective outcome: design its environment.  

Environment design 

The time you have in “deliberate mode” is perishable.  Think of it like going Super Saiyan as Goku or being in bullet-time like Max Payne.  You have a limited time of hyper-focused attention.  The key is to spend that time doing things that will influence your behavior when you’re in automatic mode.  The absolute best way to do this is to design your environment with a purpose in mind.  

The blueprint of effective environment design comes in 2 pieces:

• Kill potential distractions

• Make it easier to do things that you want to

If we kill distractions, we don’t allow our Roomba to bump into random objects in the room.  If we make it easier for our Roomba to move in the areas it needs to clean, it does the job in half the time.  These 2 design philosophies lead to one thing: reduced friction.  

Ultimately, this is the goal we’re trying to achieve.  Reduce the friction (increase the probability) to do what it is that you need to do.  If there’s one thing you take away from this article, make it this: use your perishable free will to design an environment that makes it easy to be the person you want to be when you don’t have free will. 

• A porn addict will have no choice but to quit porn if they have no access to it. 

• A writer will have no choice but to write if their internet is turned off, smartphone is locked away, and video games are removed from their environment. 

• If there isn’t a pack of Oreos on the counter to eat, then how are you going to cheat on your diet?

The opposite is also true.

• If you put your smartphone on your bedside table, chances are high you’ll be looking at it first thing in the morning.

• If your gym clothes aren’t laid out for you the night before, chances are you’ll skip your morning run.

• If you have TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook on the home screen of your smartphone, chances are you’ll spend a majority of your life on social media (and bear the consequences that come with that).  

By deliberately designing your environment, you’re making it as easy as possible to be the person you want to be.  

🎬 Actionable Advice

The most valuable action you can take right now, in order of importance:

• Spend time self-reflecting on who it is you need to be in order to get what you want.  Figure out who that person is and what kinds of actions they consistently take.    

• Design your environment to make it as easy as possible to be that person.  

  • Kill anything that distracts.

  • Reduce the friction to desired behavior.

• You won’t get this perfect the first time, but the goal is to iterate.  Reflect on regular intervals to see if you’re making progress towards your desired behavior.

• If you’re making progress, keep going.  

• If not, redesign your environment.  It will take a few tries.  There’s only ever going to be 2 areas that you should focus on improving within your environment: reducing distractions or making it easier to do the things you want to.  Don’t worry about anything else.  

✏️ Summary

• We need to consistently do the right things over a long enough timeline to succeed.

• The problem is: over a long enough timeline, we don’t have free will. 

• We behave more like machines whose behavior is rooted in probability (we are Roombas).

• Understand that you have 2 modes of consciousness and little control of your actions over the long run. 

• However, you DO have the ability to influence the probability of your actions.

• The key: use the free will you have right now to design an environment that makes it easy to do the right things over a long enough timeline.  

• Effective environment design boils down to 2 things: reduce distractions and reduce friction. 

🔮 Next Steps

In this very moment, some of you have that rare bottle of deliberate free will at your disposal, ready to use.  And then some of you are here just procrastinating and probably won’t take action after reading this.  That’s fine too, but come back to this article tomorrow and reassess!  However, those of you who do have that fleeting moment of free will and want to change some behavior of yours, use it now.  It’s a valuable but degradable resource.  When you do have it, use it to become who you need to in order to get what you want.  

It’s a great day to be a happy Roomba.  Until next time, friends.