The Power Of Paying For Something

If you want to change your life and get consistent with a new habit, you can't rely on your willpower and you must leverage your environment. 

To explain this concept I often use the metaphor of a river - If you’re sitting in a canoe on a river, the current will take you effortlessly downstream. If you want to go in a different direction, then you need to paddle. And you’re capable of overcoming the current temporarily but eventually, when you tire out and stop paddling, the river’s current will take you exactly where it wants you to go. It is unrelenting.

The river is your environment, and paddling is using willpower. If you want to consistently go a certain direction, you need to make changes to your environment so that the current naturally pulls you the right way.

There are many things you can do to improve the influence of your environment - change your surroundings, add accountability, change your unconscious beliefs - but the one I want to focus on today is making a financial investment. When you pay for something it completely changes the way you show up for it, and that’s primarily because of something called ‘loss aversion’. 

Our minds are literally wired to prevent us from wasting money, time, or effort we put into something. It’s like a psychological need, which means that we’re unconsciously motivated to take action in ways that allows us to preserve what we have. So if you want to exercise more, you’re more likely to follow through on it if you pay for a gym membership, and even more so if you pay for a personal trainer, to avoid wasting the money you’ve invested.

Fundamentally, when you make an investment in something, you’re designing your environment for success. You’re redirecting the river’s current so that it takes you in a more favorable direction. And that’s because when you pay for something, you’re aligning with this concept of ‘loss aversion’ and getting it to work for you.

That’s not to say it’s all you need to do, but it’s one variable that’s more effective than most in driving sustainable behavior change. And that’s the goal - When you take positive action consistently, you increase the likelihood of producing a positive result.