A greylag goose will drag a volleyball into its nest. In Niko Tinbergen's animal studies, which Clear draws on, geese retrieving eggs that had rolled away would sometimes work harder for a bigger, rounder object than for the egg itself. Herring gull chicks, which peck the red spot on a parent's beak to ask for food, pecked faster at a cardboard beak with a bigger red spot, and went wild for a fake beak with three oversized red dots.
Clear calls these supernormal stimuli, and his claim is that you live surrounded by them. A bag of chips is a concentrated version of the salt, sugar and fat that were scarce for most of human history, tuned by food scientists to a "bliss point" so appetite never gets bored. The wanting is real and, like the goose's, out of proportion to what it delivers.
Wanting can grow bigger than liking
Researchers who blocked dopamine in rats found the animals stopped working for food and water. Put sugar in their mouths and they still showed pleasure. They could like something without wanting it. Mice that got a hit of dopamine every time they poked their nose into a box were, within minutes, doing it up to eight hundred times an hour. Dopamine, in Clear's telling, is the chemistry of anticipation more than of pleasure. As a reward becomes familiar, the surge moves earlier, to the cue that predicts it.
Gritting your teeth works badly for the same reason. A craving is a forecast that some action will improve the present moment. Resisting it does not satisfy it; it only clears a space for the urge to pass through. The better action needs a forecast of its own.
The same object, two forecasts
One person looks at a cigarette and anticipates calm and company. Another anticipates the smell, the dependence, the damaged lungs. Same cigarette, different forecast, and one pulls while the other repels. Clear's view is that emotion runs ahead of reasoning here. The brain predicts how a response will feel, the prediction becomes a feeling, and the feeling starts the action.
The first move is to look under the craving. Nobody wants pixels or smoke. They want to feel less bored, less anxious, more connected, more certain. At a dinner in Istanbul, Clear sat with seven people, almost all former heavy smokers. One had quit after reading a book that kept attacking what cigarettes claimed to give him, until smoking looked like a habit that took his calm, his money and his confidence rather than providing them. The need for relief was still there. The forecast that a cigarette would meet it had broken.
Borrow some wanting from something you already want
Ronan Byrne, an engineering student in Dublin, liked streaming television and needed to exercise. He wired a stationary bike to his laptop so the show played only while he pedaled fast enough. Slow down for too long and it paused. Clear calls this temptation bundling. After the thing you need to do, allow the thing you want to do, and keep the order strict, so the cue for the necessary task begins to predict something appealing. It will not make the work delicious, but it can make the start attractive enough for the work's own rewards to arrive later.
The chess family
Laszlo Polgar believed expertise could be built through education, deliberate practice and habit, and he and Klara built their family life around chess. Their home was full of chess books, pictures of players and constant games, and their three daughters were educated at home inside that world. Susan started at four and was beating adults within six months. Sofia became a world champion at fourteen. Judit beat her father at five and, at fifteen years and four months, became the youngest grandmaster at the time. The detail I find most telling is that they liked it. Sofia was once found playing in the bathroom in the middle of the night. Chess was how the girls belonged.
Clear's rule is that we imitate the close, the many and the powerful. Four of ten students in one small MIT robotics class, the one future astronaut Mike Massimino sat in, went on to become astronauts. In Solomon Asch's experiments, nearly 75 percent of participants sided at least once with a group of actors who had all picked an obviously wrong line. Belonging can beat evidence, so use it deliberately. Find a group where the behavior you want is normal and where you already share something, like the fitness community Clear mentions, built for people who think of themselves as nerds and gamers. "I am a cyclist" turns into "we are cyclists."
Change the forecast, then give it a ritual
A wheelchair user in the book refused the idea that the chair confined him; without it he was stuck in bed, and with it he could leave the house. Clear calls that reframing. It leaves the facts alone and changes which of them dominate. "I have to" becomes "I get to." The boxer and writer Ed Latimore noticed that putting on his headphones sharpened his focus even with no music, because headphones had come to predict writing. A cue precedes a state often enough and starts to summon it.
One warning. Dissatisfaction is what gets anyone moving, because it marks the gap between where you are and where you would rather be, and without a gap there is no reason to act. Desire starts a behavior, but experienced satisfaction is what repeats it, and satisfaction is the gap between what you got and what you expected. Clear's first thousand subscribers took three months and felt like a party. Years later a thousand could arrive in a single day and he barely noticed. Wanting had outrun liking again. The goose has to notice that the volleyball will never hatch. The useful kind of desire is the kind you can aim, and then, when nothing needs changing, put down.
Three things to keep
Name the feeling the craving is chasing, then find a better route to it.
Pair the thing you need to do with something you already want, in that order.
Join a group where the better habit is normal. Belonging pulls harder than willpower.