You know the expression we are what we eat? Well, for me...I apparently ate a fat guy.
But I am working on it. I'm about 1/3 of the way through 75 Hard and currently down ____ pounds.
Because instead of being what we eat, I think we are what we do every day.
Last week I put it this way:
When did Michael Phelps become great? It wasn't when he won his 23rd gold medal, not his 10th, his 1st, nor when he first jumped into the water for any of those races. Instead, it was when he made the decision and took the small actions that made him the person who won those medals.
So this week, I want to talk about habits. Or how DO we do the things every day that make us great?
But first...some science!
How Habits Work
From a neurological perspective, your body starts learning new things using your prefrontal cortex. However, as we repeat the behavior over time, it becomes more automatic and is gradually transferred to the basal ganglia, which is a part of the brain responsible for the learning and execution of habits. This process is known as "automaticity."
We move our ability to do things around in our brain as we get better at them!!! Isn't that wild?
At first, new things are difficult and take a lot of processing power. For example, think about day 1 of learning to drive.
For me, that took place in our Temple's parking lot. At one point, a guy in a white car pulled up next to us and asked me to roll down the window, and I swear I thought a former Mossad agent was about to arrest me for driving underaged (it was the week before my driver's test). But, when a behavior becomes a habit, it no longer requires much conscious thought. This frees up the prefrontal cortex to focus on other tasks, which is why habits can help conserve mental energy.
This is a fancy way to say that as you do things, you get better at them and can do them without thinking hard, which lets you figure out what to do next to make it all better.
This is why we go from that day 1 of driving to doing it while listening to music, telling our kids to be quiet, and texting simultaneously.
Just kidding, do NOT text and drive. Nothing good will come from it.
How does this help ME?
My goal here is to help you make the important things consistent and second nature. Which allows you to keep working towards learning new things, focusing your efforts more, and ultimately achieving more success.
If you REALLY want to dive deeper into this, I have three books for you:
Atomic Habits - this one is the most modern (he references the other two books a lot) and really takes the biggest swing at habits as business productivity.
If you're only going to read 1 of these books, I would vote for Atomic Habits, but I also think I got a TON more out of it having read the other two first.
So let's apply all of this to your law firm!
What is a Habit?
A habit is a behavior repeated consistently, often without thinking.
Every morning I take a walk.
Every time I get a lead, I send a thank you card.
Every time I watch the Dolphins, I get upset as they blow the game.
In combining the info from the above three books, it's basically:
A cue or a prompt: a time of day, another event, etc
This leads to some want or cravings: I want ice cream for dessert or to get the gross taste out of my mouth (morning breath...get your mind out of the gutter)
Which causes us to do something: walk, eat, brush our teeth, drive to a certain place, etc
We then get a reward: HELLO, dopamine!!!
How to Plan Your Habits
We went into this last week, so I will not go too deep here. Instead, I want to focus the rest of our chat this week this way.
5 Tips for Better Habits
1) make it easy
2) track it
3) build habits on top of each other
4) have a buddy
5) have Patience
1. Make it Easy (or Hard)
A few months ago, I wanted to eat more fruits and veggies and eat less junk food. So how did I make this easier?
And at first, that was it. Sounds stupid easy, right? That's the point.
Just having the apple in front of me v. the Oreos I couldn't see not right there sometimes made a difference.
Don't be afraid to start small.
Start with 7 minutes (or 6, or 1).
Does your firm want to get more referrals? Set a reminder in your CRM every day to call a referral source and a potential referral source. If you want to have a better relationship with your spouse, set a reminder every week to have a date night.
2. Track It
Come on, you know me well enough to know this was coming. I don't care if it's checkmarks on a piece of paper or reminders in your phone you need to cross off.
Track it.
Progress > Perfection
If you hit it 100% every week, congrats. If you don't...keep making progress.
3) Stack your Habits
This comes from Tiny Habits, the idea of stacking one habit on top of the next.
I hope we all brush our teeth every morning...but I assume we don't all floss every day. Habit stacking would say that once you're done brushing your teeth, you should add in flossing right there.
You're already in your own mouth, in the bathroom, focused on oral hygiene. Just put it together.
I have an Alexa routine for the morning and evening that does this (or at least reminds me to do this and other things).
The more you make the stacked habits make sense with each other, the better.
Finish a run, and do some crunches.
Finish a meal, and add a carrot.
Close a case, and ask for a review from the client.
Use what you already do to trigger you to do more.
4) Have a Buddy
Listen...I know people who pay $3000 a month for coaching to have someone tell them to do what they already know they should do. BUT also to hold them accountable. (seriously if $3000 is the difference between executing your vision or not, it's SO WORTH IT).
I have a zoom call every Monday, where I make commitments in front of other lawyers to do something for my firm, and then we get together again on Friday to review what we did them,
Whatever form this accountability takes - DO IT!
High seas raise all boats.
Two people shorten a road.
We are stronger together.
And if that's not enough, what I just told you above, and basically in EVERY business book.
Traction has the weekly Level 10 Meeting
4DX has the cadence of accountability (surprise, it's a weekly meeting if not daily)
The 12 Week Year wants you to join WAMs (weekly accountability meetings)
5) Have Patience
This is going to be hard. You're not going to nail it 100% on the first try (if you do, you need to think bigger).
Give yourself some fucking grace.
How long does it take to develop a habit? I have no earthly idea.
Some say it's 21 days.
Others say it's 66 days.
I believe the ones who say it varies by habit (but that makes it even MORE confusing for us).
At the end of the day, who knows? But a little goes a long way, and it all adds up over time.
In theory, you should live to be more than 80 (current life expectancy in America is 76-79, depending upon the source. Some other countries are over 80.
So even if you are reading this on your 40th birthday, you have
40 years
2080 weeks
14,610 days
350,640 hours
21,038,400 minutes
Take small steps and enjoy the journey instead of only caring about the destination.
Until next week! May you not get your kids out of the house as functional adults only to be saddled with your grandkid for the whole summer to spin off the 70s into the 90s (or do that if it brings you joy!)
Next week we will be discussing the best things to automate.
Until Next Friday,
Jordan Ostroff
Jordan,
When I was in college at UCF I was a history major. That gave me three options after undergrad.
1) law school
2) the CIA
3) moving to California and begging the MythBusters to take me on
Clearly, you know which one I went with, and over the last few years, it's certainly come to be the RIGHT choice for me.
But if there's one thing that I learned being a history major, it's that history repeats itself.
So when it comes to the "threat" Chat GPT and other AIs have on our livelihood as professional knowledge workers, if we look to history, we can find this more recently happening all the way back in...1960-ish.
It was only called automation, and it was coming from factory workers. And guess what? We are still here! Life finds a way!
Automation
IBM has a REALLY cool definition I want to use. Automation is a term for technology applications where human input is minimized.
So by being a human and wanting to minimize my input (aka being lazy), I went to Chat GPT and asked it about automation, and it gave me this insight: the best things to automate in life are repetitive tasks, tasks that can be done by a computer more efficiently than a human, or tasks that consume a lot of time.
So I present to you - 8 of the BEST things to automate in your life!
1) Contracts and invoices
You need to get paid!
And the easier you make the process, the more likely someone will hire you.
And the quicker you make the process, the more likely someone will hire you.
And the better you make the process, the more likely someone will hire you.
If you ONLY do one thing I have ever told you to do, it would be to come up with your ideal client. But if you only did two things I tell you, it would be (assuming your ideal client cares about speed and ease of use, and clarity) it would be to automate your contracts and invoices.
2) SYANATH/O
That's a self-made acronym for Shit You Always Need At The House/Office.
Amazon will set this up for you AND give you a discount for doing so! So Automate it.
3) FU!
Whoa...calm down, buddy. This is for Follow UP, not anything else.
The series of emails and texts you send to clients to get them to book a consult, to get them to hire you, and, after a case is closed, to get them to leave a review/send more work/become a referral source.
This is SO easy to automate, AND you can use that automation to give you more time to be personal with everyone. So it's a win-win-win (you-your staff-the client): follow-up intake and outtake.
4) Court Reminders/Next Steps
Do you know what the BEST status update in history is?
The Domino's Pizza Tracker.
And guess what? Automation means you can have one too!
You can trigger automatic emails to clients every time a court date is set, explaining to them what to expect (and if they need to show up).
You can take your normal offering and break it up into stages and then automate an email every time the stage changes to let them know what stage they are in and what to expect.
For PI, this looks like something like
If you need help designing this, I might even know a marketing company that does this!
And there's the end of our time for this week. Next week we will be talking about my favorite science experiments and how they can positively impact your firm.
Until then, may you not need to escort humanity's best hope of overcoming a mushroom effected zombie crisis to some random fabled group of scientists out west.
Until Next Friday,
Jordan Ostroff
Okay, so this all sounds good, but you’re wondering how to start making these changes. The first important step was visiting this web page, so congrats! You’re already on the right track. The next crucial step is booking a consulting appointment with me so we can come up with a plan and replicate the results of so many others before you.
You can book an appointment here. See you soon!
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