Transcript

Designing #1165 · From Chad

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You won't win on willpower, you'll win on design.
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There's a story behind that. This is your daily message from
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Chad #1165 to upgrade your mental game today by telling
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yourself a better story. Because the most important story
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you hear is the story you tell yourself.
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This message is dedicated to Alexander Johnson.
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Here's the upgrade. You think the answer is to want
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it more upgraded. Thinking builds a machine, so
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the wrong thing is simply hard to do and impossible to hide.
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Here's the story. Before the cash register, John
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Henry Patterson owned a little store in Dayton, OH.
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His employees were stealing and blind.
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He worked hard, sold plenty, and never made a dime.
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The money walked out the back door and he couldn't even see it
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happen. Then somebody sold him a couple
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of these new machines that recorded every sale and locked
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up the cash. His store went to profit
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immediately, not because his people suddenly became Saints,
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because stealing got hard. And the more and more than that,
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the leak became visible. Patterson was so struck by it
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that he closed the store and went into the cash register
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business. He built the mighty National
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Cash Register Company in 1884, and more than 140 years later,
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it's still going. Charlie Munger called Patterson
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a talented fanatic and said cash registers were quote a godsend
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to retailing In quote, The people who invent things that
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make dishonest behavior hard to do are some of the quiet Saints
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of civilization. Bad behavior, once rewarded, is
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intensely habit forming. The cash register didn't lecture
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anyone, it just made the wrong thing hard.
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Paul Battledon said every system is perfectly designed to get the
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results. It gets.
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The results you keep hating isn't a verdict on your
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character, it's a read out of your design.
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Ouch, Chad, are you saying I'm designing my own problems?
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Yep. You don't have a willpower
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problem. You have a system working
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exactly as it was built to work. You keep trying to white knuckle
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your way to the behavior. You want more willpower, more
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discipline, more promising yourself that tomorrow you'll be
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stronger. And you lose over and over
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because you have a system in place that is working against
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you. So stop relying on the sermon.
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Build the cash register. If you don't want to eat it,
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don't buy it. Make the fridge and pantry your
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friend, not your enemy. If the phone eats your mornings,
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leave it in the other room. If you overspend, put a wall
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between you and the money. Don't out argue the temptation,
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Engineer it out of reach. You only need willpower once.
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Not 1000 times a day fighting the urge, but one time to build
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the system. Spend it on the architecture,
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not the resistance. Show me the incentive and I'll
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show you the outcome. Quit trying to be strong inside
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a system built to make you weak. Go build a better system
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instead. The better story to tell
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yourself is I don't win on willpower, I win by design.
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Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard, and let
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the machine carry what your discipline can't.
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Patterson's employees didn't get more honest, they just got
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watched. What in your life is currently
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unmeasured because the thing you don't watch is the thing that
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will steal you blind? Tell me a story of a cash
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register you built for yourself to from chadsmith@gmail.com.
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Send someone a text today and tell them make the wrong thing
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hard. Get a free copy of my book The
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Most Powerful Story in the World by going to from
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chad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message
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and hundreds of others are always available at
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www.fromchad.com.