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Do you have to hire someone or something to help you with your habits?
Most of us picture habit-building as a one-time decision: we choose a habit that can help us suck less, and simply install it into our brains like some sort of upgrade. Yet, what actually happens is that we hire habits for a certain period of time.
Think about it… no habit ever truly becomes a permanent part of our identity. It’s something we hire for a specific period of time until we are either too tired or too old to keep.
The notion of hiring something to help us make progress is a central theme in the Jobs to Be Done framework (JTBD or Jobs Theory). A framework that helps businesses build better products that people actually want to buy.
I’ve been reading about JTBD for quite some time now. And the more I’ve learned about the topic, the more I connect the framework to building habits.
The resemblance between the Jobs Theory and building habits is quite staggering.
JTBD explains that people “hire” products to fulfill specific “jobs” in their lives, with the ultimate goal being making progress. We have a need, an outcome we want to achieve, and we buy products that will (hopefully) get us there.
In the same way, when we’re trying to build habits, we’re really “hiring” these new behaviors to perform certain “jobs” for us, all in the name of self-improvement. We want our lives to run smoother, our health to flourish, and our productivity to soar, so we look for behaviors that will do the job.
Both JTBD and habit-building emphasize that change doesn’t happen randomly – there’s a process of selection and reinforcement.
In JTBD, you feel a push from your current dissatisfaction and a pull toward a better outcome, motivating you to find a product that bridges the gap. For example, you feel gnawing dissatisfaction with your most recent pictures online. Thus, to add a dose of flavor and class, you decide to buy a brand-new car thinking that leather seats will magically make your life feel less bleak.
Similarly, in building habits, you’re often driven by the push of wanting to escape your current situation (e.g., feeling out of shape) and the pull of a desired result (e.g., being healthier). But just as JTBD reminds us that the right product alone doesn’t guarantee progress, habits also need consistent reinforcement and adaptation. In other words, it’s not about a one-time “hire”, but the ongoing use of habits that make them useful and effective.
With all of this being said, let’s explore how you can change your habits using the Jobs to Be Done framework, starting with what we normally do:
How Do You Build Better Habits in General?
Due to my writings on the topic of habits, my course on habits, and the books I’ve reviewed also on the same topic, I receive approximately an email per week from strangers telling me that they can’t seem to replace their bad habits with good ones. Despite the avalanche of content they’ve consumed on the topic of habits, they still keep scrolling social media instead of reading books, bingeing chips instead of cutting calories, or gaming till 2 a.m. instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour – essentially doing everything except what they intended to.
When I do respond – which doesn’t always happen because sometimes people are looking for a magical cure that I’m unable to provide – I tend to stress on this: the initial focus shouldn’t be so much on changing your current habits, it should be on changing your current mindset.
I’ve done the same mistake myself. You wake up with yet another bad hangover, and you suddenly realize that life can’t continue like that. Then, you scroll through social media, amass a pile of “things to do”, and you suddenly start to plan how you’ll ditch all the bad habits and replace them with good ones seemingly overnight. Of course, this ambition is short-lived. A few days later, you’re once again drinking your sorrows at the nearest bar.
Why is learning about habits not enough to change them?
The above doesn’t work because we first need to reframe the inner dialog happening in our mind before we make outside changes.
It’s somehow like buying a guitar and thinking that the act of acquiring a musical instrument is enough to make you a musician. Of course, as you can sense, simply buying a guitar will not miraculously help you develop an ability to play it. You first need to embrace a new identity – to want to become a musician – and then use this as a fuel to add habits into your life that will make you such a person.
That’s why identity-based habits should be your go-to resource, not something stating: How to get good habits in 7 days or less.
These are the basics. There’s a lot more going on, obviously, but the goal here was to just show the traditional way of habit-building.
Now, let’s move on to building habits using the JTBD framework:
How Do You Build Better Habits With Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)?
Ultimately, our desire to have better habits exists because of a larger goal: creating a pleasurable way of life.
I don’t want to go to the gym (a good habit) because I love wearing tights and sweating like a potato in the microwave. No, I want to visit the gym because this helps me have a somehow decent body which, in turn, allows me to feel good in my own skin (pleasant existence).
But in order to start going to the gym, something else needs to happen…
Our desire to want better habits – and search for better habits – starts with a trigger.
In JTBD language, this point is called the struggling moment.
The struggling moment is the seed that leads to change.
In other words, people don’t change when everything is OK. Hell, they don’t even change when things are “meh” – not good, but also not particularly awful. They change when they struggle with something for usually (quite) a long time.
Let’s share an example from my own life to make this a bit more relatable…
Till the age of 26, I was proactively destroying my body with nicotine, alcohol, and ounces of junk food. During that time, I can’t say that I was feeling good, but I was feeling good enough. Sure, my skin looked like it was trying to relive its teenage acne phase, my belly wobbled like it was auditioning for a gelatin commercial, and my cough could out-volumize a Sony SRS-XV900 speaker. Yet, life was somehow bearable – until suddenly, it wasn’t. I can’t precisely say when it happened, but when it did, good enough turned into absolutely intolerable real fast.
At some point, staring into the mirror and seeing my soft, tired, marshmallow-like body made it painfully clear that I’d been treating my health like a distant, unwelcome relative. Then I hit a breaking point. And, something that has never happened before happened: I got up, and I declared, “That’s it! Today’s the day I quit living like this! Today’s the day I become the kind of person who works out!”
This struggle morphed into a desire for an alternative way of living – i.e., a life where I’d be healthy and fit. And at that moment, there was this realization that I want to move away from my current reality (Point A) to a better future reality (Point B).
The struggling moment was the only thing that motivated me to want to leave my current way of living, and transition to a new type of living. If there was no struggle, I would have never felt the need to change, because we are creatures of habit. We stick to what we always do unless our actions start to cause significant pain or discomfort.
For instance, we’ll never try to change our eating habits until we are sick all the time. Furthermore, we’ll typically never try to change our spending habits until we find ourselves cashless and standing in line for another credit – or begging our old boss to hire us again.
However, the struggling moment is only the starting point. It’s the thing that highlights that something needs to change. Yet, it’s not enough to lead to a permanent change.
There are forces that we need to understand. In the language of JTBD, these are the so-called forces of progress.
The Four Forces of Progress
The forces of progress will determine whether you move from point A to point B – i.e., make progress or simply dream about making progress.
Understanding these forces will help you figure out how to change your behavior from bad to good.
Let’s start with a simple categorization:
There are two groups of forces that work against each other and determine our progress in the world.
The first group are forces that enable change:
- Push of the current situation (Force 1): As mentioned above, a struggling moment causes the push. Your weight is causing you to constantly get ill, to feel bad about your body, and to probably feel miserable. Thus, you want to escape this condition. That’s the push.
- Pull towards the new solution (Force 2): The moment you realize that there is something you can do to feel better, you feel pulled towards this new way of living. In the context of our current example, you feel pulled towards a life where you feel good in your own skin. Where you are fit and healthy through exercising, or, for example, when someone is offering a revolutionary way of losing weight (which is usually a total scam).
The second group is composed of forces that block change:
- Anxiety of the new thing (Force 3): Despite our desire to live a healthier life, there is anxiety: “I’ll probably look stupid when I go to the gym!”, “I live 40 minutes away from the nearest gym. One single workout will take me approximately 3 hours!”, “Can I even do these workouts?”, “I don’t understand which are the best exercises for me!” Such type of anxieties prevent you from starting.
- Habits of the present (Force 4): You’ve already carved out a way of living, even if it’s far from ideal. You’ve built routines and learned to function within them. Sure, your current lifestyle is probably not going to make you the next wrestler millionaire, but breaking away from your deeply-rooted habits would disrupt your entire way of life. More importantly, switching to different behaviors would demand a massive amount of energy, which contradicts our natural tendency for laziness.
Typically, when we’re planning to add a new habit to our lives, we consider only the forces that promote change – the push and the magnetism of the new solution.
We’re pushed by the way things are – e.g., doomscrolling for hours on our phones and feeling sluggish in general. And at the same time, we’re pulled towards a somehow better solution – e.g., a two-month course by some self-made guru that promises to save you from your degenerating use of social media.
Yet, by not considering the forces that block change, we usually fail to adopt a new habit.
Why?
Because you can only make a change in your life when you successfully deal with the anxiety side of the equation. If you can’t deal with the forces that hold you back, you won’t change your behavior.
By seeing habit change in this way, progress becomes a simple-looking equation: F1 + F2 > F3 + F4.
In other words, you will change your behavior only when Force 1 and Force 2 are bigger than Force 3 and Force 4.
In this particular article, we are going to discuss Force 1 and Force 2. The forces that promote change.
Unpacking The Forces That Enable Change
Desire for a new way of living is never randomly generated. No one wakes up and suddenly thinks, “Today, I’m going to subscribe to the gym.” Not at all. Some combinations of events come together and lead to a struggling moment.
Once this struggle becomes somehow unbearable, the forces that enable change generate a need for a shift in behavior.
As mentioned, these forces are push and pull.
Force 1: Push
The push happens because we become extremely unhappy with how things are. You’re so dissatisfied, that you’re literally pushed to look for a new way of living.
These pushes can be external and/or internal.
1. External Pushes
If you have a smartphone and access to the internet – hey, you do! You’re daily exposed to external pushes.
“Oh, look! Another friend from college who used to eat baskets of chocolate bars for lunch suddenly looks like a swimsuit model.”
While a huge time waster and a trap for the mind, browsing through social media can serve as a push. All the pictures of people who look like they never exit the gym can nudge you. Prompt you to think about weight loss and maybe, just maybe, getting a fitness membership.
But while those external nudges are handy to get you started, you need more than some influencer’s smoothie recipe to keep you in the game.
You need internal motivators to push you to seek solutions.
2. Internal Pushes
I was typically a donut away from being fat. I neglected my health for years. I was exercising, but I was doing it only to “make space” for more junk food – at least that was the internal dialog happening in my head.
At some point, the years of carelessness led to a desire to get healthier. Not only because I wanted to feel more active and energetic, but also because I wanted to boost my confidence – after all, it’s hard to feel self-assured when you’re wearing XXL clothes to hide your chubby body.
External pushes might spark the idea of losing weight, but the internal pushes are the real reason you’ll keep exercising.
That’s the real kick in the butt – when you’re motivated from within. When you realize that you’re not going to get any younger. When you understand that taking care of yourself – your body and mind – is the main thing that leads to a balanced life.
Force 2: Pull
If the push is the force that makes you aware of your problems, the pull is like a compass in your hand, giving you direction. Highlighting the path you need to follow to get to where you want to go.
We typically experience two types of pulls: 1) an idea of a better life, and 2) preference for a particular product.
Let’s look at them one by one:
1. The Pull For a Better Life
Why did you purchase that four-digit fitness equipment? Why did you subscribe to one of those TikTok stars who talks about working out and living a healthy life? Because these contribute to your desire – to help you make progress in terms of your health.
We think we buy a tangible good, but what we’re really after when we buy products is the idea that we are progressing in life.
If a fitness equipment commercial is any good, it’ll spend about 10% of the time mentioning the product itself and the other 90% painting a picture of how using/getting the product will magically transform your life into a montage of joy and success.1
In other words, companies don’t (only) sell products, they sell an idea of how these products will make your life better. Thus, you are pulled towards an idea for a better life.
One important note here: If you can’t imagine your life improving, you won’t change even when there is a push generated by a struggling moment.
For example, a middle-aged person might struggle with obesity. However, instead of trying to change his eating habits and potentially start exercising at home, he might conclude: “That’s just how life is. You get to a certain age, and you start to gain weight.”
Is this person correct?
Well, sure, at some point we realize that our body doesn’t bounce back like it used to. You bend down to tie your shoes, and this feels like a workout.
But is the point valid that you can’t change?
Not at all. There are a lot of other aging folks who recognize their situation and are able to imagine a better life. Thus, get pulled toward a solution.
2. The Pull Toward a Solution
The pull for a better life motivates people to look for solutions.
But what motivates people to choose one solution over another – e.g., going to the gym, working out from home, hiring an instructor, or getting an electric ab machine?
Based on how we are wired, we’ll look for the cheapest and fastest way to solve our problems and escape the struggling moment.
Yes, this means that probably your go-to solution if you’re overweight will be to buy weight-lost pills or one of those bizarre fitness gadgets that never should’ve existed.2 I believe you get why.
First, they’re cheap. Second, they’re effortless. And third, they promise instant results. After all, all the commercials selling calorie-burning pills and fitness equipment that sound just too good to be true usually “guarantee” that you’ll cut the fat you’ve been actively building up for years in just a matter of days.
But is that really what happens?
Not at all. After the initial hype of these gimmick products, you are typically back to where you started – unable to find something to wear.
The important thing to understand is that products don’t always have to deliver results to be desirable. A lot of times, the product simply sells an idea for a better life.
Push and Pull Trigger Action
There will be no desire for the formation of a new habit unless push and pull work together.
This is important.
Push and pull both need to work together in order for you to consider making changes to your habits.
For instance, I might browse through thousands of pictures of ripped dudes who bench trucks and promote visiting the fitness center, but I will never search for gyms near me if I don’t think my body is in trouble. In other words, when there is no push and not enough struggle.
Likewise, if I’m feeling like a total failure because my body resembles a rolling burrito, I may not get serious about working out unless there is a strong pull. I’ll be waiting for a fitness club to open across the street, or for some magical workout system to be invented that doesn’t feel like a workout.
Push and pull need each other.
Generating Demand for Better Habits
My dad is not particularly active. Most of my friends and coworkers are also in the “I don’t work out” camp. Thus, there was never a strong external push that could encourage me to get active.
And it’s not only the people around me. When more than half of the population is obsessed with their phones, it’s hard to get motivated to do something different other than stare at funny videos for hours.
Even if you have a desire for a somehow more active life, one of the problems you encounter early on is that there is no one around to be active with.
A suggestion for going to the gym is met with a loud laugh. The invitations you’ve sent for a hike are left unanswered. Mentioning a morning run gets you looks like you just proposed skydiving without a parachute.
At some point, you either totally dismiss the idea of staying active, or you figure that you shouldn’t look for external factors to get in shape – you need to look within.
Comparing ourselves to others can be both a blessing and a curse in this case. If you have friends who are active, they can motivate you to embrace a healthier lifestyle. However, if most of your friends prefer to chill and take it easy, you’ll probably embrace the misguided belief that creeps into the minds of people over 30: “That’s how things are. At some point, you simply gain weight.”
In my early twenties, I was running and working out at home, but this was so irregular that if we met, you’d probably have said that I’ve never lifted more than a grocery bag.
At the time, I was more focused on external validation. I wanted others to like me. I was so caught up with the wants of others, that I never made time to think about what I wanted.
Since most of my best friends never considered exercising as something one needs to do, I was also sidelining this activity.
I was just getting started with self-improvement literature. Meaning that there was a push for doing something better with my deteriorating health. Yet, I never saw myself as a “gym person” because my friends didn’t see it either.
It took me years to start prioritizing my wants instead of concentrating on what others consider important.
How I did it is an appropriate question here.
How did I generate demand for a healthy lifestyle despite the lack of a role model nearby?
To be honest, I struggled with this for years.
I was reading about having a better life, but I was too weak to do it on my own. I convinced myself that I needed a workout buddy. A supportive partner who’d join me in my quest to redeem my poor life choices. No one volunteered. Eventually, I somehow gathered enough momentum to go solo. I dragged my soft body to the gym, and I kind of liked it. With time, I liked it even more.
At first, my friends didn’t say much when I started skipping out on our bar nights in order to sleep because I had to work out in the morning. But as this became my new normal, they began to question my desire to be part of the group. I was trying to keep my positions in my social circle, but at the same time I wanted to quit alcohol and smoking. Thus, visiting bars wasn’t particularly helpful. I had to abstain from these places until I was ready to sit on a table without wanting to order a drink.
Generating demand for better habits, as mentioned, starts with a struggling moment.
For years, I was struggling with weight gain, illness due to smoking, and bad relationships due to drinking. At some point, I simply got tired of my inability to escape these malicious behaviors. Thus, I kind of distance myself from most of the people around me until I created a version of how I want my life to look.
In the JTBD language, I had a push and a pull. An internal push motivated me to start doing something different with my life. And, a pull towards a life where I no longer smoke and embarrass myself due to consuming excessive amounts of alcohol.
And while these did act as a starting point to help me shift my behavior, they weren’t enough. I also had to manage the other two forces: 1) anxiety of the new thing and 2) the habits of the present.
We explore these two forces in Part 2 of this series.
Some Closing Thoughts
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You might laugh at the idea of a robot that kicks you in the butt to help you stay more active, but we typically fall for bizarre products all the time.
Why?
Because we understand that there is a dose of struggle in a particular area of our lives, but at the same time, we are unwilling to do the work to fix the discomfort.
Buying products that promise a better life is an indicator that something is wrong and needs fixing. It’s a sign that we want to make space for improvements.
But let’s be honest: buying the product is often the only step we take. We load up on self-help books, download habit-tracking apps, or sign up for the fanciest gym in town, secretly hoping these things will somehow absorb all our laziness and transport us to this magical realm of peak productivity. By doing so, we think, “Since I now have a gym membership, this will magically transport me into the gym and unlock a never-had-before strength to lift weights.”
As we eventually find out, the plastic gym card doesn’t actually lift the weights for us. The habit tracking app? Well, it’s not designed to track those three days of binge-watching murder documentaries.
When we look at the process of habit change through the lens of the jobs-to-be-done framework, it allows us to see all the forces at play. The framework highlights what needs to happen for a habit to stick.
At first, you might catch yourself reading about better habits because you notice how certain aspects of your life are not good. That’s the push, the struggling moment nudging you toward change. Then, you get pulled toward the idea that a certain plan, product, or routine might make life better.
However, understanding the forces that enable change isn’t enough. We also need to study the demand-reducing forces. These annoying troublemakers that arise when we begin to shift our behavior. These are the inner voices that remind you of just how cozy your current life is and how “impossible” it is to change your current routines.
This is where we see that true habit change isn’t just about getting excited about the outcome – it’s about wrestling with those very real mental hurdles that pop up the moment we try to shift our behavior.
I explore these in Part 2: How to Change Your Habits Using the Jobs to Be Done Framework [Part 2]
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Footnotes:
- I’m adding getting, because we typically just buy things without using them. We love the idea instead of doing the work. Why? Because forces 3 and 4 are bigger than forces 1 and 2. For example, I get a new fitness gear. The act of buying the gear contributes to my desired identity, where I’m fit and strong. Yet, I don’t use the gear because of my current inferior habits.
- I’m talking about products like the Free Flexor and the Ab Lounge.
