Article 1 : The Aha Moment

I spent a great many years waiting for the “aha” moment. You know the one. The morning when you wake up and everything is suddenly different, when all of the habits you hate fall away, motivation appears from nowhere, willpower becomes unlimited, and you finally become the person you always knew you could be.

I looked for that moment everywhere. I read self-help books. I listened to people who seemed to have answers. I found gurus who claimed they had experienced some glorious moment of enlightenment and could show me how to have one too.

I wanted the 180-degree turn. Go to sleep one night as the person I was, wake up the next morning as the person I wanted to be. Wouldn't that be nice? It would be like winning the lottery of self-improvement. I waited for roughly twenty-five years; the moment never came. 

What did come, eventually, was the realization that I was getting older while waiting for it. I had developed an unpleasant habit of looking backward in five- and ten-year chunks. If only I had started five years ago. If only I had done that ten years ago. If only I had gone to school then. If only I had taken care of this when I had the chance.

Eventually I realized that if I continued exactly as I was, five years from now I would once again be sitting there saying, If only I had started five years ago. I became tired of having that conversation with myself.

This did not fill me with extraordinary motivation. I did not leap out of bed the next morning, run ten miles, enroll in three universities, clean the house, write a book, and become a dynamic new human being before lunch. Nothing remotely like that happened. I simply admitted something to myself. I was the person I was.

Whatever amount of motivation, energy, discipline, fear, laziness, intelligence, damage, ability, or inability I possessed at that moment was what I had available to work with. Waiting to become some other person before beginning had gotten me nowhere.

So I made myself one promise: I will be better today than I was yesterday. That was it. I did not define how much better. The amount was insignificant. I did not say that tomorrow I will become healthy. I did not say I would become successful. I did not say I would become organized, educated, enlightened, thin, rich, productive, or happy; just better.

If I picked up a piece of trash rather than walking past it, that counted. If I held the door for someone, that counted. If I smiled at a colleague who looked miserable, that counted. If I put a paper clip into the paper-clip container instead of throwing it on my desk, that counted. That sounds almost silly in its smallness; It was. That was the point.

I had spent years trying to change myself with enormous gestures. Enormous gestures were apparently something I was very good at beginning and very bad at maintaining. Tiny things were different.

Around the same time, I started experimenting with the same idea with my students. Their folders were disasters. Papers stuck out in every direction. Assignments disappeared into backpacks never to be seen again. Telling them, You need to become more organized, had about the same usefulness as telling someone, You should become more successful.

So one day I had them take the papers out of their folders, put them back in, hold the folder with both hands, and tap the bottom against the desk twice; tap, tap. I called it the double tap. That was the entire organizational system.

Whenever they put a new paper into the folder, double tap. It took approximately two seconds. Within a few days it became a joke. Students would put a paper away, call out, "Mr. Lindsey!" and proudly go tap, tap against the desk. I would congratulate them. The whole thing was silly; that silliness helped. There was no great burden attached to the double tap. Nobody needed extraordinary organizational skills. Nobody had to transform into a different kind of student. Put the paper in the folder and tap it twice.

Soon they stopped needing me to remind them. It became normal. By the end of the year, their backpacks and folders were vastly more organized, homework was being lost less often, and other habits had begun developing around the first one. I would never claim two taps on a desk somehow caused every improvement. What interested me was that the first behavior was so insignificant that almost nobody resisted it.

Eventually it became like putting on underwear. You do not normally get up in the morning and think, Oh God, not underpants again. You simply put them on. The behavior has become so ordinary that it barely registers as a decision.

That was what interested me. What if improvement could become ordinary? I began experimenting on myself. Getting out of bed was difficult for me, so I did not begin by promising to leap up the instant the alarm rang. I knew that asking that of myself was nonsense. Instead I made one tiny rule. When I woke up, I would turn on a recording by Louise Hay, whose voice I found soothing. That was all. 

I did not promise to listen. I did not promise to believe anything she said. I did not promise to repeat affirmations, meditate, journal, perform yoga, or greet the sunrise with gratitude. Just turn on the television. Most mornings I turned it on and promptly ignored it. Sometimes I went back to sleep. But after a while I noticed I was lying there listening. Later I found myself paying attention.

Eventually I occasionally repeated some of what I heard. There was no great decision between these stages. The experience simply became familiar. Something else was changing at the same time. I had made another promise to myself: I was going to stop punishing myself. This may have mattered even more. I knew I could not promise to run ten miles every morning. I had never been a runner. I could not promise to become perfectly disciplined. I could not promise that I would never fail again. But not insulting myself required surprisingly little effort.

Doing something can require energy. Not calling yourself a worthless idiot requires mostly that you stop doing something. So when I forgot to turn the program on one morning, instead of beginning the familiar attack— There you go again. You can't even do one simple thing. You'll never change. I tried something else: Whoops. I forgot. I'll do it tomorrow. That was all; no trial, no conviction, no sentence, just information.

I began doing the same thing with everything I could think of. At school I started writing a small positive quotation or statement on the board every morning. I did not make a lesson out of it. I simply wrote something.

Eventually I began reading it aloud. Later I asked students what they thought it meant. At first almost nobody answered. When someone finally did, I did not grade the response or explain why they were wrong. I usually said something like, Interesting. I like that; then we moved on.

Gradually more students participated. Again, nothing dramatic happened. There was no assembly, no motivational program, no grand initiative. The behavior simply became safe and normal. 

Looking back, I can see a pattern running through all of these experiments. The double tap. Turning on the television. Picking up one piece of trash. Saying one kind thing. Putting one paper clip where it belonged. Not calling myself an idiot after making a mistake. None of these things looked capable of changing a life. Individually, perhaps none of them could; but I was no longer demanding that one action change my life. I was asking only that today's version of me be slightly better than yesterday's version.

That changed the scale of the problem. There was no finish line I had to reach before I was allowed to count the day as successful. There was no perfect Joshua standing somewhere in the future, arms crossed, disappointed that I still had not become him. There was only direction. Better today than yesterday.

Some days the improvement was substantial. Some days it was almost embarrassingly small. And some days I failed even to produce that that. When that happened, the rule against punishment became important. Whoops, I’ll try again tomorrow. Over time, something strange happened; the small things accumulated. Behaviors that once required deliberate effort became familiar. Then other improvements became easier to add. Eventually I found myself doing things that the earlier version of me would have considered completely unrealistic.

The “aha” moment finally arrived, but not when I expected it. It came after I had already begun changing. I looked backward one day and realized I was not the same person who had started. There had been no flash of enlightenment, no miraculous morning, no sudden replacement of the old me with a new one; I had changed in degrees. The transformation was large only when viewed from far enough away. 

That remains one of the most important practical ideas in the Biological Robot framework for me. You do not need to become the person you ultimately want to be today. You do not even need to know exactly who that person will be. You need a direction. Then you need to take one step; tomorrow, take another. If you stumble, do not waste the next day beating yourself for having stumbled. Stand up, look in the direction you consciously chose, and be better today than you were yesterday.