JAN 2, 2017 @ 09:20 AM 19,575 VIEWS The Little Black Book of Billionaire Secrets What Warren Buffett And Ann Graybiel Advise On Habits Pat Brans , CONTRIBUTOR I write about time management and productivity. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

http://commissioncooperation.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-warren-buffett-and-ann-graybiel.html What Warren Buffett And Ann Graybiel Advise On Habits Warren Buffett frequently explains to groups of university students that the best thing they can do is develop good habits. According to Buffett, while most students are at an age where they can still easily develop good habits, once you get older, it’s virtually impossible to change your behavior. But scientist Ann Graybiel thinks age is not as big a factor as many people think. The approach Buffett suggests to students is quite simple. Look around you and think about whom you like the most. What makes you like or admire these people? Do the same thing for people you don’t like. What are the behavioral traits that cause you to dislike those people? Buffett explains that his mentor, Benjamin Graham, used this approach to modify his own behavior as a young adult. Graham was co-author of the seminal book on value investing, The Intelligent Investor, and he was also Buffett’s professor at Columbia University. At 54 years old I’m at least twice as old as the students Warren Buffett addresses. But I’m a stubborn person. In spite of what my mirror shouts out to me every morning about my physical appearance, I still have the mindset of a 20 year old. So I decided that, going into 2017, I should try out Buffett’s approach. I thought about the people I interact with and listed the traits of those I most like, along with the traits of people I like less. I like kindness and generosity, modesty, sincerity and good humor. I like disciplined and goal-oriented people. I especially like people who have healthy lifestyles. I dislike selfishness, unclear intentions, sarcasm and gossip. I dislike people who blame all their problems on external forces, and those who are perpetually dissatisfied. I especially dislike people who are coercive. But before setting out to change my own habits, I decided to second-guess Warren Buffett by finding out what scientists think of his approach and my list of good and bad habits. So as the year 2016 came to a close I got on the phone with renowned expert on the neurophysiology of habit formation, Ann Graybiel to ask a few questions. MIT professor, director of the Graybiel laboratory at MIT and recipient of the National Medal of Science in 2001, surely Dr. Graybiel would have an opinion on the set of habits I listed. Pat Brans: What do you think of Warren Buffett’s approach to developing habits? Ann Graybiel: Buffett is a marvel and he has good ideas here. Habit by imitation is a wonderful idea. The ancient Greeks wrote a lot about that. Finding mentors is truly important in life. However, I don’t necessarily agree with Warren Buffett on the part about getting too old to develop new habits. Brans: Wow! That’s great news for me, a 54 year old. Tell me more about age and habits. Graybiel: I don’t think it’s ever too late to change habits or to make new ones. I do know that it seems more difficult to acquire new habits as one gets older. But I think that has a lot to do with the time constraints of older people. The older you get, the busier you get—if you are working and taking care of your family—and so the less likely you are to devote an hour a day or so to working on things like being modest. But this all in the end comes down to motivation and weighing different priorities in life. And motivation very much depends on reinforcements—good ones and bad ones. Brans: Are the things I’ve listed as good and bad habits truly habits in the same way breathing or eating—or even learning to ride a bicycle—are habits? In other words, are all these things supported by similar brain functions? Graybiel: It’s hard to come up with an adequate definition of habit—and it’s even harder to make the difference between habits and skills. Let’s say it takes you months to learn a difficult piano piece by Bach. Then you stop playing it for several years. When you come back to it, you’ll re-learn it in a fraction of the original time. Part of what’s happening when habits form is what we call “chunking.” You learn the behavioral pattern and your brain packages up the whole sequence, along with beginning and ending markers, so that you no longer have to think of the details. Cues typically start the sequence—we all know that: Just seeing where the candy is kept makes the habit of eating one that much stronger. That’s very much how both habits and skills work. http://www.forbes.com/sites/patbrans/2017/01/02/what-warren-buffett-and-ann-graybiel-advise-on-habits/2/#7f1bef836174 Pat Brans , CONTRIBUTOR I write about time management and productivity. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Continued from page 1 Pause Mute Current Time 1:14 / Duration Time 1:38 Loaded: 0%Progress: 0% Share Fullscreen I believe the traits you listed can be learned, but for some people with great difficulty. I’m pretty sure that this is because the same fundamental neural mechanisms that control what we all think of as habits—you know, the fellow puts his right hand in his pocket and jingles his keys every time he’s thinking, or she brushes her teeth before she combs her hair—also control the kinds of traits Warren Buffett talks about. We know now that just as there are descending pathways in the brain, that for many years were called “central pattern generators,” which control things like eating and breathing and walking, there are other pathways that go up from the basal ganglia toward the neocortex—the part of the brain that controls higher level thinking. I believe these pathways going into the neocortex are crucial to doing the very things you’ve listed. We call them “cognitive pattern generators.” These pathways serve to generate the de novo patterns of behavior that can become habits. But we have to watch out. Because unlike some of the motor patterns that get glued into the spinal cord and brain stem, these circuits are rather vulnerable. We have to tend them more than we have to tend the ones in the lower functions of the brain. These 'habit' patterns in the brain have to get renewed reinforcement from time to time. We’ve found in the lab that the habit patterns can be flipped on and off by the neocortex—it is quite amazing. Brans: Now I’m fully on board. What approach would you advise me to take to change in 2017 based on the two lists I’ve made of good and bad habits? Graybiel: I think there are some tricks to keep in mind when you’re trying to learn the wonderful qualities you’ve brought up. You need context, reinforcement, consistency and hard work. I tell people that if you want to jog in the morning, put out the shoes and the gear the night before so you see them first thing in the morning. If you want to eat better, put fruit out on your kitchen table. For the behavior traits you’re talking about, you also have to put yourself in the right context, at least as you are learning the new behavior. Similarly, the attributes you listed, such as being kind or having a good sense of humor, may require some artificial reinforcement. We have to think through the long-term consequences, which is what you might call delayed reinforcement. We can assure ourselves that when we perform the behavior it will in the long run bring about a positive consequence to ourselves and to others. There seems to be a war going on among the circuits. Some of them want us to be one way; some of them want us to be the other way. We have to realize that this isn’t child’s play. This is our flexible brain. Do you want to be kind and modest, or not? You have to make a commitment, and you have to put in place some kind of positive reinforcement. The good news is that once you develop a habitual behavior, your brain then seems to treat it as a whole. As I said, this is when the pattern gets chunked. To get to that point, you have to do the whole thing over and over. This may be arduous at first. But over time, the behavior you are working on will become a habit. I’m a big fan of William James. I haven’t found anything that equals William James’ 1890 essay on habits, in which he advises, “Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.” This is a key point. If you work on a habit all week and then decide to take a day off because it’s Saturday, you’ll fall right back into the old habit. So developing habits is effortful. But what a reward to get there, to learn something new! And in the process, you learn about yourself. 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