Dan Brown, author of the The Da Vinci Code fame, believes hanging upside down is a cure to his writer’s block. Rafael Nadal, the legendary tennis player’s quirks are more elaborate – he takes a cold shower 45 mins before every match, towels down after every point, never gets up from his chair before his opponent and points drinking bottles toward his current playing end of the court, in an exact same kinda way. Victor Hugo, wrote both Les Misrables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame while he was nude. You, dear reader, are not that neurotic? Maybe that’s why you haven’t written a bestseller nor made it to the Wimbledon final yet.

At the outset, these feel odd and strange, even like some sort of fetish (e.g Hugo above). When I first considered this idea, the rationalist within me balked. I’ve been deliberate about distancing myself from the overtly ritualistic Hindu brahmanical culture that I was born into. All this changed when I stumbled upon research that advised the exact opposite. It made me stop and recognise the dissonance within me. Highly rigorous, objective scientists are telling us that rituals help. A lot. That, rituals channel and re-invigorate our energies, relieve us of negative feelings and help us find meaning in what matters.

These are bold claims. Yet the skeptic in me reminds – what of the mindless ceremonies that often felt numbing? At its worst a form of suffering inflicted by a sadistic society. “What am I missing?”, I asked myself.

What I’ve learnt since has helped me change how I see the world working. I now look for meaning in common rituals I practice and have invented several quirky customs of my own. I’ve even championed deliberately designing rituals at work, as a deliberate act in creating culture.

Wrap it in a ritual

I take pride in embracing my cognitive dissonance as a “moment of truth” for learning. Reading this paragraph below, was one such moment

Thinking that rituals are irrational (“this is crazy, why would I do this?”) is actually a barrier that it can be helpful to overcome. Our research suggests that embracing them, no matter how silly, can improve our well-being. […]

So we can quite deliberately say “I’m going to create a new ritual” and that will work?
Yes.

[8]

The first big insight for me was to evolve my own definition of what rituals can be. Rituals are not just elaborate and high effort social ceremonies that evoked uncertain feelings. It can also be small and often idiosyncratic customs, private to a person, family or a small group of people. Your family probably adds a few touches of colour to Diwali (or Ramadan or Thanksgiving) in a way that no other family does. No other couple may have the unique pet names and theatrics that as you, no one else might talk to their dog like you do. No team might start the day or the week like yours does.

The second aha moment was when I learnt that rituals are not draining. They are often energising, even soothing. Waking up early is an intentional routine I’ve wanted to build. And yet, after several tries, it felt difficult and oppressive. It is only when I understood the difference between habit formation and a ritual that I started approaching this more creatively.

Habits, in contrast to rituals, are less intentional and more automatic. The struggle in changing a habit or forming new ones is something we share with the rest of us. I devoured all the recent books on the science of habit formation. Equipped with new tools, I deliberately designed cues, committed to following a pre-designed set of actions and instituted little rewards to game my subconscious urges. It was slow progress, like the authors had warned. “It is steady and it will compound”, I told myself. Yet, one minor disruptive event like travel or a particularly heavy work week and all the carefully laid plains were disrupted. A major life changing event came along (for me, a new job) and I felt like I was back to base. This was clearly an unstable, delicate equilibrium. It sapped at my will power.

I found my next question, in BJ Fogg’s MAP framework [11]

I lacked motivation.

Any amount of self-talk doesn’t count as motivation. My motivation was linked to the small amounts of progresses I make each day, but then I feel doubly de-motivated when I regress. So I asked myself, “What will help me be motivated at the outset?”

The first part of the answer I found was simple, yet powerful. I could wrap habit formation inside rituals. Delightful rituals.

Invent delightful rituals

Habits are both natural and practical. Rituals are neither. The difference between habits and rituals are how aware and intentional you are.

The utility of the ritual isn’t related to its practicality. Absurd rituals can have high utility. If it helps you create that sense of control, if it calms your anxiety, that’s what matters. Think of performers who do strange rituals before performing. They know that walking in a circle three times while repeating a mantra doesn’t help them win, but it helps them calm down so they can perform.
[8]

In a recent interview, Rafael Nadal admitted, rather disarmingly, [8] “Each one has to find their way of concentrating. There is no absolute formula. I would like not to have them [the routines], I am not hiding, but tennis is such a mentally aggressive sport that anything external [can distract a lot] ..;
“It works for me and they make me focus while I compete. I feel more sure of myself,”

The rationalist in me had found a semblance of logic to go with the creative licence. How can I bring my attention to the present moment, what in my pervious experience made this happen naturally?

Have you ever stared into a sunrise or a bonfire? What about that particularly soothing music that makes you stop and lose yourself in it. The temple bell or the gong that rings, the smell of the first raindrops on warm mud. These evoke a particular feeling that is primal and mesmerising. It is no wonder that fire, sounds, songs and music are integral parts of so many rituals worldwide.

So the next question I asked myself was this – using external aids that tend to my senses — of sight, smell, hearing, and touch — how can I invent a morning ritual that is inspiring and energising. The answers were both creative and simple and I’ve now done this for over a 108 days. It goes something like this:

I wake up with the urge to feel the cool touch of water on my face, then walk to the study and start writing whatever comes to my mind and then purge it, clearing my mind of any background “cache” and latency. I then go the drawing room, which has a meditation corner, sit on the floor mat and ring a Tibetan bell, listening to its receding tone blend into the morning quiet. My pet dog wakes up to that, comes running to me and does her good morning jiggle – a delightful serendipity. I then sit for about twenty to thirty minutes meditating to my breath. The first memory of this itself is so energising that I wouldn’t miss it for anything. What earlier felt like a difficult and oppressive process to build progress, has now transformed into motivation for the ritual itself. The compounding, of course, will still happen. I’ve since gone on to create a few more such deliberate habits that are wrapped in delightful rituals.

However, as I tried to apply this, I discovered my next big hurdle. Equipped with this exciting hammer, I tried transforming every problem into a nail to hammer in. Until my lazy and sometimes sleepy inertia caught up with me, with a familiar pinch of overwhelm.

Finding Keystones: Small wins

Both in folklore and in academic literature “small wins” are celebrated for a reason. Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are key part of how widespread changes happen. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.

“Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage,” one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.” Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach. [2]

Hidden inside Charles Duhigg’s wonderful book, The Power of Habit [2], is a concept that is not well elaborated, but triggered my curiosity – Keystone habits. Those that trigger a positive domino effect. Says Duhigg, “… identifying keystone habits is tricky. To find them, you have to know where to look. Detecting keystone habits means searching out certain characteristics. Keystone habits offer what is known within academic literature as “small wins.” They [small wins] are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes.”

Exercise, he says is a keystone habit, that has a domino effect on our energy. For me, waking up early was a keystone habit, I knew this instinctively based on my past experiences. What I also realised is that I should use the delightful ritual hammer sparingly, to nail keystone habits. And let the rest unfold.

While this idea solved for reducing overwhelm on which habit building resolutions to focus on, it still didn’t solve my “unstable equilibrium” problem. I still had to find a way to reset momentum when things unexpected disruptions arrive. This time, I found my answer in an unusual place – learning from resilient startup teams.

The secret ingredient: Forcing functions

In fast paced startups, a weekly check-in on progress made can be too slow, given the rapid nature of learning, the iterations involved and simply the uncertainty around “what is the right thing to do”. It is impossible for managers to review everything and stay in touch people on the front lines, in a one-on-one manner. There also isn’t enough motivation for senior managers to absorb information across layers – a vital ingredient to innovate. The simple management hack that works well is a “stand-up” meeting, a classic example of a forcing function at play.

Well designed stand-ups are usually a cascading set of short, frequent meetings that forces a quick update from everyone, everyday. It highlights the unexpected and makes people commit to finding answers. They know they’ll be asked again next day, so it is a commitment that they take seriously. Tough conversations around prioritisation are forced to happen in real time.

Forcing functions are incredibly useful tools because they:

1. change our future default to taking action
2. create a timeline to track progress towards a larger goal
3. give “last-minute bursts” of motivation (or anxiety) to consolidate work into a deliverable

Forcing functions are defined as any task, activity, or event that forces you to take action and produce a result.

[3]

Recently, another accidental event at work re-affirmed my understanding of forcing functions. The team working on a particular feature realised that accidentally a customer announcement had gone out at scale, about a week before the feature was fully tested out and ready. It left us with two choices:
1. Send a corrective communication now and one more re-affirming release a week later
2. Release tonight
We chose the later. Everyone came together to make it happen – business, engineering, product, testing, comms teams all worked in sync, like clock-work. The internal communication that confirmed we’d released at high quality also said, there was no material impact on end users. One of the team members then quipped, “we should release more feature like this”.

Coming back to my morning routine struggles several months ago, and now equipped with this secret ingredient, I asked myself the next question – “What forcing function will make me wake up everyday, to a level of consciousness that I the delightful urge of the ritual will take over?” I soon found a quirky answer:
I usually wake up with a vibratory alarm. A regular alarm at 5am literally “alarms” my wife – who struggles to sleep again. So I deliberately put a second loud alarm two minutes after the first one on a different device and kept it away from the bed. This forces me to wake up and walk up to the second alarm and switch it off within two minutes to “Diffuse it”. It has gone off on a few occasions, but that brings an even stronger forcing function to play.

To clarify, Victor Hugo’s fetish-like practice of writing when being naked was a way to stop procrastination. Hugo, locked away his clothes to avoid any temptation of going outside. This way, he finished his novels weeks before the deadline. It was his weird version of a forcing function.

To sum it up

* Rituals, when deliberately designed, form positive reinforcements to motivate you to take action
* Focusing on keystone habits provide leverage to build small wins, that go on to build a positive domino effect
* Forcing functions bring things back on track, when there is inevitable diverge or loss of focus

References:
[1] Daily Rituals: How Artists Work: Currey
[2]The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business: Duhigg, Charles
[3] Create Forcing Functions To Get More Done
[4] What is Forcing Function?
[5] The Restorative Power of Ritual
[6] New Research: Rituals Make Us Value Things More
[7] Habits, routines and rituals at work
[8] Ditch Your Habits and Create Rituals Instead
[9] How a Simple Ritual Can Make You Feel Better
[10] (PDF) From Habits to Rituals: Rituals as Social Habits
[11] Tiny Habits by Fogg, BJ
[12] ‘I Don’t Always Get It’: Rafael Nadal