On Board the Elephant

Imagine the rider — your conscious mind — sitting atop the elephant running a major business. Think Bill Gates on safari. Like any busy chief executive, this rider has to deal with thousands upon thousands of bits of information and demands from the outside and inside world.

Some input is new, novel or important, and the conscious mind deals with it. You perceive this as concentration or attention. "Paying attention" literally means electing to spend your energy focusing your conscious mind on something you find important or interesting.

Other input is unimportant, uninteresting or frivolous, and your executive mind tosses it in the trash. These are the things we ignore and forget.

The input that gets sent to the elephant is different: it is familiar. When the conscious mind perceives familiar input it says "I do not need to waste energy on this, my elephant can handle it," and the subconscious takes over.

To understand how a habit works, break it into three parts: the trigger, the routine, and the reward.

• Trigger — the input that starts the chain reaction. It can be a sound, a smell, a touch, a taste, the presence of another person, a place, a word, a phrase, or even a feeling.
• Routine — the automatic sequence your elephant runs once the trigger fires. This is the part you notice, usually after it has already happened.
• Reward — what the elephant actually gets out of it, which is often not the obvious thing.

The trigger is special because it carries meaning for your elephant. Smell freshly baked cookies and your mind immediately unpacks a suitcase of meaning — memories of your mom, your childhood home, or simply the taste and the comfort. The smell is not the point. The suitcase is.

This is why willpower aimed at the routine so rarely works. If you leave the trigger and the reward untouched, the elephant will keep looking for a way to run the routine.