Video transcription
Yesterday’s video introduced the idea of 2 kinds of endings to a day or a week. They are the machine ending and the living ending. The living ending, which we do each night in the check-in, is started by your Witness hero. It then continues with your Hacker hero, and thats who we are going to talk about today.
Your Grunt is the core member of the “working in” team. If you imagine your Grunt as an ultra-distance marathon runner; then the Witness and the Hacker are his or her “working on” support team.
The Witness helps the Grunt to reflect on his or her performance. The Witness takes stock of outcomes, acknowledges and celebrates wins, and commiserates on setbacks. And then they pass over to the Hacker to help set up the next stage of the journey.
The Hacker hero has 2 qualities that make them indispensable to the habit building team’s success. They are a good learner, and they are a good problem solver. You need these capabilities throughout the habit building journey.
IN the imagined campfire circle of our Heroes that I talked about yesterday. The Hacker joins the circle and sits in the gap between what your Master points to as important, and what your Witness reflects on as current state. His or her role is to come up with a plan that the Grunt can execute on to reduce the gap between these.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all habit routine. They are sort of like an orthodontic treatment; you can’t put someone else’s braces in your mouth and expect them to work. As a problem solver your Hacker starts with a goal that the Master has set, and researches, and talks to other people, and thinks about how they could take the team through to realising that goal. They’ll select a starting point, a generic-shaped habit, and then they ask some questions that will help shape it into a tailor-made habit for you, that they think will work. They ask, amongst other questions;
- When will we do it?
- How long will we do it for?
- And how frequently will we do it?
When you first start out on a habit builidng journey the habit plan is by definition untested. It also generally doesn’t cater for the inevitable external impacts on your routine, and more often than not it is over-ambitious and doesn’t cater for your learning curve.
The nightly check-ins are where your Witness and your Hacker convene a meeting between your heroes. Your Hacker asks questions like;
- What are we doing that we shouldn’t be doing?
- Does the Grunt have a clear unequivocal task, and time to do it?
- Do we need to adjust our frequency goal?
- What extra support could we give the Grunt?
The Hacker’s role in summary can be summed up as simply this. To problem solve HOW to build a robust habit that fulfils the goals OF the Master, and is actionable BY the Grunt.
I leave you with the encouragement to do the check-in ‘s each night. If you don’t already have a robust habit in place they really are an essential part of building that.