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Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again in optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. On today’s call, I want to talk about why discipline is an absolute lie and why habits are the key to your ability to find success. First, welcome to Show 100. It's been actually a quick run to 100. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed this daily call podcast as much as I've actually enjoyed doing it. I love this medium of communication. I think it helps in so many different levels. I still like to write. I still like to do webinars and videos. But for me, just sitting down and recording these podcasts has been insanely helpful and this has been my habit. This has been a habit that I’ve wanted to develop and wanted to hone in on which is why I’ve made the commitment 100 episodes ago to actually do a daily show and that’s been a real key for me, is to make a commitment to you guys to be here every single day and to show up, talk about something that’s relevant, provide value, help you out in your life, in your trading journey which hopefully we've been doing and if we have, let us know, give us a rating, review on iTunes, etcetera. I think that today’s topic is really important because not only do we reach Show 100 by basically the end of the year, but as we start into 2018 which is crazy to believe that we’re already here, I think what you have to understand is that in anything that you do… I've learned this for sure over the last like let’s say three years I’ve really, really learned this, that discipline is a total lie. Discipline is something that we talk about a lot. “They’ve got to have discipline, got to have discipline.” But it’s really impossible to have discipline. Discipline is something that people strive to get or strive to attain, but they just never can reach. It seems like it’s always out of reach. They try to be disciplined and then they’re not. This happens a lot with New Year’s goals, like New Year’s resolutions. People make a resolution every year. And the gym gets more packed or people who go regularly like me and my wife and our kids. It gets insanely packed the first three weeks of the year and we always think to ourselves like – “Okay. This is a phase. It won’t last.” People don’t have enough discipline to do it. But discipline is a total lie because success is actually a really short race and most people don’t understand this. The think success is a long-term race. It’s really not. If you think about success, success is about building a series of habits that are great habits that eventually carry you forward in the future. Here’s what I've learned about myself and our brain and everything and hopefully this help you guys out. Our brains are hardwired to reduce energy, meaning our brains don't want to think, they don’t want to critically think. They want to do things in the form of a habit and habits are these subconscious triggers that allow our body and our mechanics to do things that we just normally do without actually thinking about it, like we don’t consciously think about what we’re doing. Take brushing your teeth for example, driving a car now. Like you get into a car, you probably do almost the exact same mechanics in the exact same order at the exact same time without even thinking about it. You come in, you start the car, you might check your mirrors, you might adjust whatever, turn the radio on or not, buckle your seatbelt. And you do those mechanics so often, you don't think about it. You don’t consciously get into the car and think to yourself, “Okay. Now, I put the key into the ignition. I turn it clockwise 25%.” You don’t think about that. It just happens. It’s a habit that your brain has developed. It’s a track in your brain that your brain plays over and over. It’s like the “get in the car and drive” album. The brain just pulls it up and then sets the habit on top and basically plays the track. That is what you have to get to if you want to find success, is to develop those habits that lead to success, successful habits. Now, here's something I learned that I think really, really is helpful and I didn't really understand it when I first learned it. But your brain has no way to distinguish good habits from bad. Think about that. Your brain has no way to distinguish good habits from bad. All your brain is trying to do is reduce energy and reduce output and cognitive strain. And so, if you have a habit of say smoking, your brain has no idea that that is actually bad for you. Now, you know, but your brain has already had a habit of pulling out a cigarette and lighting it and smoking at certain times during the day or when it’s triggered or queued by certain environments or certain people or certain foods. Your brain already is playing that habit. And so, that's what’s really important, is that you can have really, really strong, powerful habits that are making you do all of the wrong things and that's why it seems like it's so hard to break free because it’s just natural for you to… I don’t know in that case. I’ve never smoked before in my life, but I guess it’s natural for people to pull out a cigarette and maybe smoke. That's a habit that has been developed and is so ingrained and grooved into your brain that it's really hard to fill that in and to break that habit. Here's what happens. Discipline becomes the chain breaker of these bad habits and it helps create new habits. When I said that success is actually a short race, it is really a short race until you develop a habit, until a habit kicks in. Discipline is what gets you from wanting to have that habit in place to actually having it in place. It's the bridge that… I was going to say it’s the thing that bridges the gap really. The bridge is the gap is what I was going to say. But it’s the thing that bridges the gap from where you are now to where you want to be or the habit you want to develop and in most cases, that discipline has to last over 30 days. Some people say it takes 30 days to 20 days to build a habit. I think it’s more than that. I think research wise, it’s like 45 or 60 days to really, really build a habit. But discipline is the ability to get up and to do the thing that you need to do or to break the habit of doing what you're doing now that's bad for you. In this case, we talked about smoking. It could be trading, day trading, futures trading, anything. What I say is you should also build in any type of personal commitment. Having a coach is really a good way to do this, having just somebody that is an accountability partner. You can build in technology to help out with this. But basically, set yourself up, understand what you are doing wrong right now or what habits you want to change right now and set yourself up to first break those habits and then develop new habits in place of it. Now, the best way that you can do this and a great book you should read on this I think is called… I forgot what it’s called, but it’s the happiness advantage or I think it’s a yellow book. I got to figure out what it is and let you guys know. I’ll let you guys know in the show notes page. But basically, the best way to break a habit is to figure out what the queue is, like the thing that triggers your habit to go off and then to replace it with something else. A classic example of this might be coffee. I will not give up coffee because I love it too much. But if somebody wanted to give up coffee, their queue for drinking coffee might be that their alarm clock goes off and they walk downstairs. Now, that’s a very simple queue. It’s something that they’re going to do anyway. Their alarm clock is going to go off and they’re going to walk downstairs. Their first inclination is to at that point, start the pot of coffee. Well, what you could do is the night before, instead of having the coffee setup, you setup tea. Instead of having coffee, you just totally take the coffee pot out of the room, put it in the basement, lock it in a box, like whatever you have to do, so you can’t get to it or it’s hard to get to. You have to really work and spend a lot of cognitive energy to get to it. You replace it with tea or whatever you want to do, water, milk, juice, whatever. And you replace it, so that you still have the same queue in the morning. But now, when you wake up, your queue is to wake up at the alarm clock, walk downstairs and turn on a pot of tea or pour a cup of water or pour a cup of juice, something that is different, but has the same queue. That's the best way to break these habits and develop new habits. I think this is really again, important to talk about as we wrap up 2017, get into 2018 because a lot of people make all these New Year’s resolutions and I don’t believe in all that stuff. I think that those cool things that you can talk about in New Year is like, “I want to do something different this year.” That’s all great, but it ultimately comes down to habits. Success is a very short race. You have to have discipline enough till a habit kicks in and once that habit kicks in, you’re golden. The last example I will give to this and just my own personal example on stuff has been trading. I tell people often that you guys, people in this Option Alpha community are my accountability partners. We have now 75,000 people who are part of our community in one form or another. That’s a lot of accountability partners. And so, when I made the commitment to do this daily podcast, it was pretty hard to get on every single day, to find a routine to do it. But I found a routine to do it. I found a timeframe that worked for me that I could get up every single day. I had the equipment in place no matter where I was going, whether I was travelling and I was on my laptop and had to bring a speaker with me or a microphone with me or I was at home in my home office and do it there. You set yourself up for success, so that you can build out that habit. And now, it's definitely second nature to me. It's just wake up, grab coffee, record the daily call. I mean, it’s literally that type of progression that it happens for me. It didn't happen right away, but now it’s a habit. I truly don't really think about it. I didn’t think that much this morning when I turned on the recording software to do it. It just kind of clicked as I was drinking my coffee and getting ready. Hopefully that helps out for you guys in just understanding how this all works. I think hopefully it's powerful enough to get you out of some habits that you’re in right now, some bad habits. Again, your brain doesn’t know what are good or bad habits. And start to develop some new habits this year. That might help you out in your trading, in your investing, personal life, family life, spiritual life, whatever it is. It all works in the same arena. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this. As always, let me know if you guys have any comments or questions and a very happy New Year to you.