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The secret to self-improvement, in my opinion, lies in the fact that we are not animals.

“What! Yes we are! We’re descended from the great ape!”

Nope. If that were true, we would still be running through the savannahs of Africa, trying not to get eaten by lions.

The goal of Distracted Fortune is to track my own progress toward incredible wealth, and use that experience to help you do the same. You, Dear Reader, get to learn from both my successes and my failures.

One thing that is becoming clear to me is that true success is 10% luck, 20% circumstances, and 70% personal self development.

This article will detail a concept I maintain, that helps me keep perspective when I inevitably fall off the horse.

The Tripartite Self

A person is made up of three entities. I’ve found the best way to see these three entities is to imagine them as the Beast, the Rider, and the Marshall.

The idea isn’t original with me. Experts in psychology have come up with similar constructs in the past. For Sigmund Freud, there was the Id, the Ego, and the Superego; for Plato, there was the Appetite, the Reason, and the Spirit; and there are others with similar concepts.

Here is a summary of how I envision these three entities:

  1. The Beast

The first entity is the one who eats crap, scrolls through endless feeds, and is dazzled by flashy things. It’s also the one who brushes your teeth in the morning, who remembers to wipe well after taking a dump, and checks your blind spot before changing lanes.

This is the chimp that climbed down from the trees so long ago.

In a very real way, I think this creature is an animal. Animals are not stupid, but they function based on innate ability and instinct. Animals can be trained to do incredible things, but they can’t decide to train themselves to do incredible things. They require a person to do the training.

Animals are limited to a small range around their innate abilities.

  1. The Rider

The second entity is the one who gets the Beast to wash its hands after using the bathroom, the one who gets it to eat a salad before the lasagna, and the one who remembers to call your mom today. The Rider is the responsible one, who gets the Beast to do things that are good for you and for others.

When you try to start a new habit, the Rider is the one who works to tame the Beast’s worn-in behaviors. For example, when you get prescribed medication, you need to consciously make yourself take them. That’s the Rider doing the work.

  1. The Marshall

The third entity is the planner. When you say to yourself “I need to stop eating all my boy’s Halloween candy”, that’s the Marshall talking.

The Marshall is the one who comes up with the things you want to do to become a better person, and develops the plan of attack. It’s also the one that gets horrified after you notice you just doom scrolled the afternoon away. This is the you, watching yourself. This is your free will.

In people like you and me, it’s also the one who tends to get harassed by that pernicious bully, the Inner Critic.

This group of entities work together to make up who you are and what you do. The Beast is always on the job, just trying to do what it wants to do. The Rider is sometimes working in harmony with that Beast, gently guiding it to perform miracles; but sometimes the Rider is asleep at the reins, letting old Beast run on autopilot. The Marshall sometimes jumps in at a moment’s notice, and smacks the Rider “Wake Up! We can’t let Beast do this anymore!”, but usually the Marshall comes on the scene when things are calmer, like in the early morning, or when you are reading or learning something new.

For example, Beast is right now reaching in the pantry for your kid’s granola bar, because Beast is hungry. The Rider is trying hard to turn the ship, but to no avail. Later, after plowing the snack into your face, the Marshall reflects, and starts thinking of ways to either deter the Beast from future snack raids, or how to remove the temptation altogether, because there’s no way the Rider can rein in that Beast when there’s food on the mind.

How to Build Good Habits

Some of my old friends used to rip on me for being “Kantian”. By that, they meant that my Rider was using the whip too much, to punish the Beast into doing things that were unnatural.

Regardless of whether Kant actually viewed the self like this (I don’t know!), whipping poor Beast is both far too easy to do, as well as not effective. You have to be a bit more generous and forgiving, because the Beast is just doing what it thinks is best.

A fantastic model for how to do this comes from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. In it, Clear lays out a set of laws for building good habits, and breaking bad ones. Using these steps, your Marshall will be able to plan a robust strategy to help the Rider pilot your Beast to the promised land.

  1. Make it obvious

To build a good habit, Clear suggests finding a prompt that will remind you to perform your habit. That cue could be an alarm, something that happens every day (like, waking up in the morning), or another habit that already exists.

As a cue to your Beast, Clear recommends you design your environment to be conducive to the habit. He compares the well-disciplined person to the person without discipline. Usually, it has very little to do with will power, and everything to do with organizing your surroundings to help you accomplish what you want to accomplish.

This is so forgiving for the Beast. It allows the Marshall to use its gift of creativity to help the Rider maneuver the Beast to desired goals.

In converse, to break a bad habit, you need to remove the cues from your environment. Get the candy out of your house!

  1. Make it attractive

If the Beast wants to go in some direction, and the desired outcome happens to also be in that direction, it will be much easier for the Rider to guide it.

You want to want to do the habit, so pair it with either something you want to do, or something you must do. If you want to read more books, set up a special super comfy spot in your house just for reading. If you want to exercise more, drive by the gym on the way home from work.

This also works for bad habits. Make it unattractive. If you want to avoid overspending on your credit card, give it to your significant other. If you want to stop biting your nails, use a bitter tasting nail polish.

  1. Make it easy

If you have to do a bunch of stuff just to start your new habit, your Beast will lose patience and give up. You want to make it easy for the Rider to guide your Beast to success, so reduce the number of steps between you and the habit. For example, if you want to write in your journal in the morning, don’t leave your journal in your desk, rather put it right next to your bed.

Likewise, if the habit takes too long to do, your Beast will give up. Pare your habit down to something that can be done in 2 minutes or less. Again with the journal - instead of committing to a half hour of journaling, just commit to write one sentence every morning. If you want to go to the gym, commit to put your gym shoes on every day. Once you get that tiny habit going, it will be far less work to add more onto it.

  1. Make it satisfying

Remember B. F. Skinner? Skinner demonstrated that, when you reward an animal for doing what you want, the animal will do that more often. This is called Operant Conditioning. Skinner once gloated that he could get a pigeon to spin in circles in less than 5 minutes using this method.

Well, we’re training our Beast to do the right thing, so the Rider doesn’t have to work so hard to ride it. After you successfully perform your new habit, give the Beast a treat! That reinforces the feeling that the habit produces good feelings. That treat could be a little candy, a bit of TV, a walk around the block, whatever will make you happy.

One particularly effective form of reinforcement was described in the previous post, on The Chain. Clear calls this a Habit Tracker. Each time you perform your habit, make some kind of visible mark that you did it. This could be an X on a calendar, adding a paperclip to a chain of paperclips, adding a quarter to your bank, whatever. Every time you add to that chain, you get a tiny hit of dopamine that reinforces your habit.

Here is one habit I’ve adopted that uses all four steps. Every day at 1:00pm an alarm goes off (make it obvious), which prompts me to spend 2 minutes (make it easy) writing a list of all my current fears (the habit). I do it right after lunch (make it attractive), and afterwards I mark my habit tracker in my journal and eat a little something sweet (make it satisfying).

Love the Beast, Help the Rider

The personal trinity may or may not be a real construct, but it certainly helps me to get habits going, and to be more gentle on myself when I screw up.

I am sure that if you start thinking like this about your own life, you will find yourself becoming happier and more effective.

So what are you waiting for? Take five minutes right now to think of times when you couldn’t stop your Beast from doing something you want to avoid, and come up with some ways to break that bad habit, and replace it with a good habit. That’s what the Marshall would do!

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