Atomic Habits II

Hello everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at FBI where We Build Better Contractors.

This week I want to continue to talk about Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's a remarkable book. It's sold over 10 million
copies. He's got over 2 million subscribers to his weekly newsletter, and it's really quite amazing. Now what about this is
important to you? We kind of went over some stuff last week as we talked about the British cycling team. Why talk about
incremental improvements to you folks? I mean, you're at the peak of your careers. Most of your successes are behind
you, frankly, but you're running organizations. And the British cycling team was an organization. It was an organizational
improvement, not just individual, but the accumulation of individual improvement. And if you can get your teams to
engage in this 1% better thinking, then your organization is going to prosper the same way British cycling did.

This week I want to talk about the Showtime Lakers. They started in 1985 in that season with a 29 and five record. Okay?
And the sports writers were writing all the accolades. It's the best team in the history of basketball. The best team in the
history of basketball did not make it to the finals. Think about the talent: Kareem, Magic, James Worthy, all Hall of Famers,
Michael Cooper, Sixth Man of the Year, role players like Kurt Rambis, all the greats, people that are legends, if you're from
that era and you watched the NBA back then with Magic and Larry Bird. They lost in the conference finals to the Houston
Rockets. So, with all this talent on his team, Pat Riley has some thinking to do. I've got immense talent, trading for more
talent, upgrading. That's not going to get, I've got the most talent of any team in the history of basketball.

How am I going to raise this level, so we not only make it to the finals, we win the finals? Well, he started a program called
CBE, Career Best Effort, and he talked about taking the numbers of the players. He went back to high school and recorded
all their numbers for points, rebounds, assists, minutes, et cetera, et cetera. And his goal was to, "Improve their output by
1% over the course of a season." So, in that sense, Pat Riley anticipated James Clear, whatever, 35 or 40 years later didn't
he. He said, "If they succeeded their performance by just 1% over the course of the season, that was their CBE, Career
Best Effort. So, they measured not only hard things like numbers, they measured subjective things like spirituality, mental
and physical effort. And so, there was a lot more to this program than just the numbers.

And they compared players across the league. They compared the individual players to their previous seasoned numbers.
And what happened? Was Pat Riley able to extract this last tiny bit of excellence from this already excellent cast of players?
Yeah, he did. They won the championship and then they repeated for the first time in what, 20 some years? Two in a row.
So that's how well it worked. With all that talent he didn't rely on talent alone, he relied on a specific program called CBE.
Okay, let me take a quick break and talk about Boot Camp. Dallas in May, Denver in August, Toronto, Canada in October,
and back here in Raleigh in November. So, sign up your folks for Boot Camp, please, and we'll see them on the road or
here in Raleigh in 2023.

All right, now let's talk about something different. Let's talk about 1992. Scottish knee and hip replacement study. Now,
knee and hip replacement in 1992 isn't the outpatient, wasn't the outpatient thing that we have today. No way. It was
huge. And so, for this study, the researchers selected the people who were most likely to fail in recovery. They were all
senior citizens, they were all low income, and they all had little education. So, they picked the people that, historically
they had observed, did the worst in terms of rehab. And I can't imagine how hard the rehab was in 1992. So, the medical
team said to increase their pace of rehabilitation, we got to see if we can somehow increase their willpower. So, here's
what they did, they gave each of the patients a booklet describing best rehab practices. And then the booklet had 13 blank
pages, one for each week and a quarter, if you think about it. They observed, they asked some people to write down their
goals and others, they just left them to the own devices.

So, the people that wrote down their goals walked twice as early, they were in and out of chairs unassisted three times as
early, and they were back to doing normal household things like putting on and tying their shoes, preparing meals, doing
the laundry unassisted, much, much faster than the people that didn't write their goals. Why? Written goals with detailed
plans for execution work, as this study demonstrated, and that's why we're on you all the time about doing your business
plan, having a written plan, having a CBE program like Pat Riley, where you consciously try to extract that 1% more talent
from your already talented people.

So, in this study, they talked about the people that had deliberate design for plans and actions. Like one man, when he
thought about walking, he didn't just say, "I'm going to walk a block." He said, "I'm going to walk to the bus stop to meet
my wife when she gets home from work." So a very specific plan, producing a very specific outcome, Clear provides all
kinds of tools, examples, studies. I mean, it's really an excellent book. Jamesclear.com if you want to download some of
his graphics or tools or something like that, it's really worth your while.

So, I'd like to know what has worked for you in forming your team's habits? Inspiring that last 1% of discretionary effort
from your folks. Please share with us in the comments. And this is Wayne Rivers at FBI, where We Build Better Contractors.