you're not doing everything you intend to do you don't have the habits that you want to have you don't have the behaviors locked away on a daily basis that you wish you had this probably describes you it certainly describes me there's a lot of things that i wish that i would do more regularly and it's an ongoing process i'm sure you feel the same way i want to examine a management practice that might be enlightening for you as it has been for me in recognizing what behaviors i'm not engaging in and why and i want to frame this correctly in terms of the kind of timeline of adopting a new behavior and sticking to that behavior this is square one the vast majority of your behavior change is past this it's important to understand that a lot of our behavior problems tend to be the result of bad implementations of good ideas in other words you may have what we talk about today totally covered for a given behavior and still not performant well that's because what we talk about today is not the whole story it is only the first part we're going to talk about the basics of this principle and then later on in the episode we'll dig into more details and how this particular principle might interact with those later steps but first let's cover the basic principle for any given behavior the reason a person may not engage in that behavior is that they cannot or they will not let me state this again the reason that you are not engaging in some behavior is because either you are incapable or you are unwilling you cannot or you will not now let's put a little bit more boundary on what this really means because it sounds a little bit reductive at first until you think all the way through different applications of this model either you cannot do something or you cannot do something and you cannot do something and you cannot do something because you are incapable from a pure skill level maybe you're incapable emotionally or physically or maybe it's actually impossible to do that thing or within your context it's impossible to do that thing so for example while it may be possible to win the lottery three times in a row it's practically impossible and you can for all intents and purposes treat it as impossible so to be very clear can not is not purely an expression of a lack of skill it is also an expression of limitations secondly will not is not purely an expression of active unwillingness in other words you are not necessarily defying that thing though that would count in the will not equation but a lot of the time our will nots are actually implicit we will not engage in the vast majority of possible human behaviors but not because we are vehemently against doing that thing it's just because most of the time the things that we do choose to do have a stronger incentive or availability to us a mundane example might be oh i won't travel out of state to buy commodity items because there's not really an incentive to do so importantly this does not mean that those stores are failing at marketing i will on the other hand travel out of state to buy commodity items but i will not for vacationing or maybe to purchase a rare item that i can't get anywhere else so taking a step back and looking at both of these factors you can begin to profile the various actions that you take or at least attempt to take in your life and the various actions that you don't take there are far more actions that you don't take and so they can be less interesting except for the ones that you consider taking think about the options that you didn't choose those are the ones that are worth profiling against this particular model returning to our lottery example virtually everyone that you talk to will probably have the will to win the lottery three times but it is nearly statistically impossible to do so profiling will and ability is also the basis of most negotiations for example the last job that you took or the next job that you will take is going to be based on the number of times that you took the last job that you took and you may have taken the last job that you may have taken and you may have taken the last job that you may have taken and you may have taken the last job that you may have taken and you may have taken the last job that you may have taken and you may have taken the last job that you may have taken and you may have taken the last job that you may have taken for the compensation amount provided and to your ability to do the job for the compensation amount provided both of these are going to be gauged by both parties the interviewing party is going to gauge whether you're willing in order to even move forward with the interview you will gauge whether you're willing in order for you to move forward with the interview and the hiring party is going to be gauging your ability as are you to do the job for the compensation amount provided and you may have successfully. Gauging either of these things incorrectly, especially significantly incorrectly, is an expensive mistake in hiring. The interesting thing about this model is that it works both at the macro level, like we were just talking about with jobs, but also at the micro level. Our daily habits and our daily skill applications, these also can be described by this model. We're going to talk a little bit more about that micro level and how to use this model. Right after we talk about today's sponsor. This podcast is brought to you by Split. Split is the feature management and experimentation platform. What if a release was exactly that? A moment of relief and escape from slow, painful deployments that hold back product engineers. With Split, you can free your teams and your features by attaching insightful data to features that are not just for you. Split helps you quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release, which means you can turn up what works, turn off what doesn't, and give software innovation the room to run wild. Now you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and finally exhale. Split feature management and experimentation. What a release. Reimagine software delivery. Start your free trial and create your first feature flag at split.io slash developer T. That's split.io slash developer T. That's split.io slash developer T. That's split.io slash developer T. That's split.io slash developer T. Thanks again to Split for sponsoring today's episode. Think about some behavior that you would like to engage in that you're not engaging in. Make it as specific and atomic as possible. Now, before I forget, I'm going to go ahead and plug for later on down the road, right after you've kind of walked through this first step, I'm also going to plug James Clear's Atomic Habits. It probably doesn't need a plug, honestly. Everybody knows about this book at this point, but that is kind of the second step in this process. Once you've aligned yourself on the can't or won't and determined whether you have the motivation and the capability to do something, the next steps beyond that become how do you operationalize adopting those behaviors into your life. But we're upstream from that in this discussion. So, imagine one of these behaviors that in your mind, when you kind of try to describe yourself to yourself, what you would like to say. This identity-based way of describing our behaviors helps us attach more meaning to our behaviors in the first place. So, what I'm asking you to do is figure out a behavior that you wish was a part of your identity. You truly do think that you could do this thing. Now, I want you to evaluate on a scale from 1 to 10 how much your abilities match that particular behavior. Can you actually do that thing? Now, recognize that I'm not talking about abilities in a bubble. I'm not saying if somebody gave me enough resources, I could do that thing. Or if somebody gave me enough time, or if I only had the focus, I could do that thing. All of those impediments, all of those hurdles, I want you to count as a part of your can. Can you do this thing? Well, it's going to depend on if you can get over those hurdles. Are you able to get over those hurdles? Now, based on that context, it's very important that you base this next part on the context of the first part. We'll talk about why in a second. Are you willing to do that? We've already talked about this being a core part of who you believe you are, right? This is something that you care about doing, that you want to do, that you think is in line with your preferred identity. But in the context of the cost, are you willing to do that thing? Now, if you are capable, in other words, if you believe that you can, that it's physically possible, or that it's mentally and emotionally possible, for you to do these things, then the only thing that's left is the will. Do you have the will to do that thing? Well, if it's possible for you to do it and you're not doing it, then the answer is no. I don't have the will to do that thing. That's not a judgment on your ability to follow through with your commitment. That is not the kind of will that we're talking about here. This is not willpower, and this is not grit. This is purely a measurement of observation. If you have the ability to do the thing and the sufficient will, which is the motivation, the incentive, then you will do that thing. Notice that this is a holistic measurement, right? We're looking at this and we're saying, okay, if I do have the ability and I'm not doing it, then I don't have the will. And we need to look at this very closely because we're not just, again, we can't judge will in a bubble. We can't say, are you willing to endure the pain of going to the gym? No, that's not what we're talking about. Instead, what we're talking about is, are you willing to endure the pain of going to the gym after a long day at work instead of going home and relaxing? Understand the difference here. Being able to endure pain in a bubble without the context of everything else around you may be easy to say yes to. But when we count, other factors like, for example, competing incentives, this is, am I willing to do this thing more than I'm willing to do this other thing? This is not an internal investigation at this point. Instead, you can look at your behaviors and answer this question. I am being incentivized to go home and relax more often than I'm incentivized to go to the gym. Why is that? Why are those incentives not actually aligning with what I say that I want? Now, a lot of the literature, a lot of the study that's done downstream from this, when we started talking about atomic habits, et cetera, is about reducing the friction. In other words, reducing the detractors on that incentive equation. Making it easier to say yes means that the incentive and the will is easier to accomplish. And some of this is because of the weirdness of our brains, the way our brains work. We don't have the ability to do that. We don't have the ability to do that. We don't have the ability to do that. We don't have the ability to adequately measure either the can or the will. In other words, we imagine that it's possible to win the lottery three times in a row. And so we keep buying tickets because we've made an error in judgment about the can side of the equation. Similarly, we imagine that the gym may be more painful than it will be. Maybe we underestimate the reward that we'll get as a walking out of the gym, the positive feeling of that. Maybe we overestimate how good it will feel to relax instead. Regardless, these measurement errors on the will side and on the can side are taken care of after, kind of downstream. The majority of our actions, we can identify up front which of these two things is missing. For any given behavior, we ask the question, is there a possible pathway to that behavior? Is it possible for me, to do that? Am I capable of doing that? And secondly, will I do that now? Am I going to do that under the current circumstances, given my current kind of other activities in life? All of this can lead you to the right actions to take in order to set yourself up for success later on. Maybe those right actions are as simple as, well, I can't eat healthy in my home because all of the food that I own is unhealthy. So in the current state, if you were to ask kind of a snapshot, can I? Then the answer is no. So focus on fixing the can, right? Focus on fixing whether or not it's possible. Finally, I want to cover a very quick wrinkle that should act as a lens for thinking about this problem. When we think about what is possible, we're not talking about theory. We're talking about practicality. What this means is that we respect the limits that we have. We respect, for example, that we have temporal limits in our lives. This means that I only have so much time, both in my life and in my day. And so another distinction that you can make is can never. Will never. Will never. These are important because we can come to terms with the idea that we can never do something or that we will never do something. Additionally, we can use this as a frame of reference. If we say, well, I can't do that now, then we should be asking ourselves, can I do that eventually? Is this a can never situation? Is this a will never situation? My life may change drastically in the next few years and my incentive structures may change. Where I spend my time and how I spend my time might change. And so to say can never or will never is a huge statement. It's important to recognize the weight of this. It's easy to say can't today. It's much harder to know whether you can never do something. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope this propels you into understanding and shaping the things that you choose to do. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope this propels you into understanding and shaping the things that you choose to do. That you can feel empowered by recognizing your capacity to do something and then actually take action on improving the incentive structures, improving the why, improving, you know, reducing the friction between you and doing that action that you care so much about. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Split.io. Split is the feature management and experimentation platform that reimagines software delivery by attaching insights to your data. 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