Focus: Prevention of Random Events

Prevent Random Events. Distractions slow us down on our way to the goal. Shiny objects drain energy and consume bandwidth. Beware The Shiny Object. Prevent Random Events.

As CEO, your job is to Delegate, to create a Reality through the Actions of Others. Your focus must be clear. Your focus must be like a laser.

As CEO, you must come to your business as one who is working a plan rather than one who is wondering what's going to happen next, or grasping at straws, or reacting to Random Events.

You are either In Control, or Out of Control.

Choose.  Commit.  Act.  Learn.  Repeat.

CEO School: Fundamentals

First time CEOs, and many seasoned CEOs, will benefit from a review of these Fundamentals. Knowing is not Doing; it takes consistent practice to create bulletproof Habits. Corporate culture starts with the CEO.

Communication

Sales Solves All Problems. The number one job of the CEO is to communicate. The CEO must communicate The Vision, the Dream, the Goals, the Plan, the rewards for achieving the Goal. This is Selling 101. The CEO needs to be the top salesman in the company. Fundraising and Recruiting are key aspects of selling the dream.

Know Your North Star and Follow it absolutely. There are only a few basic principles of success in business and they have been known for a long time, but most CEOs either don't know them, or have forgotten them, or they violate them in pursuit of opportunistic gains. There are thousands of new books every year that purport to reveal some all-powerful new technique that will make you an instant billionaire. Beware the shiny object of the solution du jour. It's all the same stuff: repackaged common sense.  For the last 35 years, DoubleM business principles have been written down as the Ten Commandments for Managing a Young, Growing Business. This poster is suitable for framing and free for the asking.

Talk less, learn more. You can't learn anything with your mouth open. Avoid these topics: politics, religion, sex, gambling, etc. The more you listen, the more people will think you're a genius. “Be sincere, Be brief, Be seated.”  Franklin D. Roosevelt

Breathe before speaking. Take your time before spewing forth. Know what you are going to say before you say it. If you take a slight pause before you speak, you will have your audience's attention.

Ask questions, and pay attention to the answers.  When you do speak, ask, don't tell. Ask a lot of questions to learn and draw others out.

Smile, a lot. People like people who smile. People follow, and buy from, people they like. You would be amazed at how long it took me to learn this. Most of us are so inside our heads that we forget this most important and powerful gesture. My smile story.

Delegation

Delegate, but don't abdicate. Or, to be more clear: Do it; Document it; Delegate it. You can't and shouldn't do everything yourself. Build faster by delegating. Clearly written processes/checklists make delegating effective, especially if the person's job description is to continuously improve the documentation. Delegation is not Abdication. Know the difference. Delegate everything possible; only do the things that only you can do: Communicate the Dream. If you don't have someone you can delegate something to, then Always Be Recruiting.

Always Be Recruiting. You will never have enough great people. This concept of "Always Be Recruiting" is one of the more overlooked basics, until all of a sudden you lose a key team member, then it becomes a fire drill to fill that seat, and because it's a rush job, it's usually done sub-optimally. Read this.

Kaizen: Continuous Improvement.  (Link) The law of entropy is universal and omnipotent. Everything always changes, and almost never for the better. Build a culture whereby everyone's job is Continuous Improvement. This list is under continuous improvement! Are you?

Write it down

Take copious notes. It demonstrates that you are paying attention and value what you learn.

Follow up in writing. Almost nobody gets this right, and yet it is the hallmark of a true professional. See Commandment #4.

Keep a Journal. There's a lot of scientific evidence to support the fact that keeping a journal is a good thing for people to do. The benefits include reduced stress, faster recovery, feeling of peace, greater focus... do you need more?  Keep a journal. You'll be amazed at how good it is...

Know the Score. Business is a game. You must know the score. Focus on selected daily/weekly KPIs. Have professionally prepared monthly financial reports including Balance Sheet and Profit/Loss statements, at a minimum. Delegate bookkeeping as soon as possible in the life of your business.  Life is a game. Money is how we keep score. Ted Turner

Have an agenda. Send it in advance, and follow it. Be organized and respectful of your team members' time.

Good Habits

Sleep and Let Sleep. Consistent sleep is the best thing you can do for your health, energy, focus, concentration, and the quantity and quality of your work. The madness of Silicon Valley startup culture whereby CEOs demand workaholism is counterproductive. Read this for the sane point of view.  And, now here's the ugly argument, from a top VC.  VC greed can drive the CEO to demand insane behavior from his team. Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Ben Franklin.

Be On Time. Never be early, never be late.  Get there ahead of time and wait until the appointment time before you walk through the door. Being early is an inconvenience to the person you are visiting. Being late is an insult, and demonstrates your lack of preparation. Make it a game to appear at exactly the right time. You know they will look at their watch and be impressed with your punctuality and dependability. Make it a habit, a point of personal pride, and an shining example to your team.

Exercise consistently. Even a little exercise, done consistently, is far better than sporadic strong workouts. Get away from your computer frequently throughout the day. Walk around, drink water, do a few pushups, do something, but do it consistently!

Eat right.  Make nutrition an intellectual decision, not an emotional reaction. My food story.

Dress appropriately. Quietly communicate the highest level of professionalism.

Optimism breeds success. Become this person. People will follow you to the ends of the earth.

Practice Gratitude. Read this.

------------------------

If you value quotations that inspire, motivate, and educate, 

especially for entrepreneurs, 

you will want to download ToBeWise, 

the extraordinary FREE app for iOS and android devices.

ToBeWiseApp.com

Two versions: Free and Pro

Be wiser than other people if you can: but do not tell them so.
Dale Carnegie

App Needed: Addiction Manager

Hello, my name is Michael and I am an addict. 

My addiction is dopamine. 

My source of an unlimited supply of it is online in the form of "News". 

Other sources of this dopamine flood are facebook, instagram, etc.

Something is always happening somewhere that's gonna get me hooked and falling down the rabbit hole to a time suck while dosing myself with more juicy dopamine... More, more, more! 

I know it's a bad thing. I gotta stop. 

But it's so easy to get a hit, just a click away. 

How would James Clear (Atomic Habits) deal with this? 

Just a simple matter of eliminating a bad habit. 

Gotta look that up. 

My first (Virgo engineer) thought is to create an app that would filter all inputs according to user-set criteria. Why exercise self control when we can make an app for that? 

STOP NEWS ADDICTION. aka “DoomScrolling”

Limit number of news viewing events, and duration of each. For example, a limit of 3 news viewings per day and limit of 20 minutes per view. Describe the act of news viewing so heinous, so ridiculous and illogical that it would be inconceivable that anyone would spend their time doing such a thing. Rather like reading the National Enquirer or other tabloid. I want to remain an island of calm in a great calm sea, with storms barely noticeable out on the far horizon. Imagine the time that can be put to other good use instead of being dosed with dopamine because of some random ClickBait. It really is a lot like trolling for idiots who will snap at the next shiny object. Do not be that idiot. 

All media exists to produce addictive dopamine experiences.

All random events reduce planned productive bandwidth.

The unlimited variety of media, and increasingly sensational clickbait (headlines, graphics, etc) all indicate a growing need to manage bandwidth for certain activities.

Resolve to recognize the motives of the medium before allowing input to proceed. And then, also based on a variety of filters. For me this would delete any news of Kardashians, all of Hollywood actually, the music scene, politics, sports, religion, gambling, violent crime, and would favor news about local events...)

Use the medium (news) for what it can provide, but with portion controls, and other similar nutritional filters (which medium (podcast, url, etc), which subject matter keywords, etc.).

Here's a list of bandwidth limiter tools.

There seems some futility to delegating our self control to technology. 

We want the quick fix.

I want to know the way where the quick fix is automatic.

Mental.

Click on.

Click off.

A bad habit (addiction) can be attributed to having nothing better to do.
Find something more rewarding to do and the "addiction" falls away.

Ideal Startup Board Meetings

One of the most painful experiences of being an advisor to startups is suffering through the monthly Board of Advisors meeting.  Most startup CEOs have no experience with board meetings, and if they do, they learned how to do them from someone else who had no idea how to do them right.

The whole concept of a Board of Advisors meeting is formal two-way communication among top level team members (the startup management and the advisors), for the purpose of moving the startup forward according to the Plan.  This includes decision making, and strategic discussions.
Startups make many mistakes when having board meetings.  Here are the top 3 mistakes startups make with Board of Advisor meetings:

1.  Not having board meetings.
2.  Canceling, postponing, rescheduling due to an imagined crisis or shiny object du jour.
3.  Lack of preparation.

When the rare startup has finally overcome mistakes 1 and 2, they almost never deal with mistake number 3.  So let's deal with it now.  What does proper preparation look like?

Getting back to the purpose of the meeting: two-way communication. Management (CEO) responsibility is to communicate to the advisors the current state of the startup.  This is done in the form of reports on the various key aspects of the business.  These may include, in no particular order:
  a. Financial (Profit and Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, Source and Use of Funds, etc),
  b. Sales (various sales reports including source of the sale, by salesperson, by customer, new vs. repeat, by product, competitive losses, etc),
  c. Personnel (new hires by job function, salary, terminations, quits and reasons, etc.),
  d. Legal (status of lawsuits, patent and copyright, privacy, stock options, etc),
  e. Technology (status of programming projects showing priorities, challenges, deadlines, etc)
  f. Key Ratios (performance indicators such as sales vs. target, average age of receivables, headcount vs. target, and many others that are specific to the type of business)
  g. Executive Summary (state of the company and issues to be addressed, decisions to be made, etc)
  h.  etc, etc, etc...

But so much more important than sharing information on recent performance, which is essentially looking in the rear view mirror, the management team should be looking forward and discussing strategic plans. This is the area where the outside advisors are of the most help. Management should choose, let's say, no more than 3 very important plans, and list them in advance in the board info packet.

Much could be said about each item on the list, but for now let's just address the format of how this information is communicated.  Most startups are surprisingly Old School, and use paper as the form of reports that are distributed at the meeting.  This is a huge mistake.

The most effective way to get the best from your Board of Advisors is to distribute these reports well in advance of the meetings (at least 2 days, preferably more) so that your advisors will have plenty of time to review them before the meeting, to ask for clarification or more information, and to have the time to think clearly and do research, etc.  The worst thing you can do is to surprise advisors with reports in the meeting itself and waste everyone's time by going line-by-line through all the reports.  I can not stress strongly enough how unproductive this is.

The best solution I have heard for effective reporting is this post by Brad Feld.  Highly recommended.

After the board meeting it is essential to close the loop with follow up notes on Action Items (Who does What, by When) and suggestions for improvement for future meetings.

For more on effective board meetings, read Brad Feld's new book "Startup Boards: Getting the most out of your board of directors".

Mark Suster, VC and entrepreneur, did a good job of defining how board meetings should be run to stay in control. Read it Here.

The One Essential Habit for Massive Success

It has been called the Ivy Lee Method, after the man who 100 years ago first documented it to help make one of the richest men in history even more wealthy.

When you read about it, you are likely to dismiss it as too simple to be effective. Surely there must be more to it.

All you need is a pen and paper; forget about apps and computers. And it takes only a few minutes each day. But it works only if you do it! Most people will not do it. Will you?

In my 55+ years of starting and running businesses, and 20+ years of advising entrepreneurs with their businesses, there is one elemental truth the ignorance of which leads to business failures. We Know what we should do, but we just don't Do it. This is the well known "Knowing-Doing Gap".

It seems we are always looking for the next Silver Bullet, the Shiny Object Syndrome, the secret to success that will propel us to success. There are tens of thousands of books, seminars, podcasts, consultants, coaches that are really all the same: repackaged and hyped to appear new and true, but it's all BS. What seems to be most true is that there is "Nothing new under the sun." That bit of advice goes back thousands of years!

Here's the short story, excerpted and simplified from the post by James Clear*, the link in the first sentence of this post.*

Ivy Lee was a successful businessman in his own right and is widely remembered as a pioneer in the field of public relations. As the story goes, Charles Schwab (no, not the one you are probably thinking about, but the other one, the CEO of Bethlehem Steel, the largest steel and shipbuilder in the USA at the time) brought Ivy Lee into his office and said, “Show me a way to get more things done.”

“Give me 15 minutes with each of your executives,” Lee replied.

“How much will it cost me,” Schwab asked.

“Nothing,” Lee said. “Unless it works. After three months, you can send me a check for whatever you feel it's worth to you.” 

The Ivy Lee Method

During his 15 minutes with each executive, Ivy Lee explained his simple daily routine for achieving peak productivity:

1. At the end of each work day, write down only the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. 
2. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
3. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task, until finished before moving on to the second task.
4. Repeat this process every day.

The strategy sounded simple, but Schwab and his executive team at Bethlehem Steel gave it a try. After three months, Schwab was so delighted with the progress his company had made that he called Lee into his office and wrote him a check for $25,000.

A $25,000 check written in 1918 is the equivalent of a $400,000 check in 2015. Not bad for a few hours work. But you now have the secret for free!

Will you do it?

--------------------

Notes:

* James Clear is one of my favorite authors on the topic of creating habits.

Charles Schwab started his career working for the richest man in the world, Andrew Carnegie, quite probably the richest man who ever lived, estimated at 3x today's richest man Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com.  Schwab was promoted quickly to become, at the young age of only 35, the president of Carnegie Steel.

I was unaware of the Ivy Lee Method when I independently formulated my own version of it 10 years ago (2008), at a time when I was in a philosophical mood and attempted to create the simplest possible 3-step process for success: Think-Plan-Do-Repeat.  The bottom line is that it's all about the habit of taking Action.  "Fear is the disease, hustle (Action) is the antidote" (Travis Kalanick, Uber founder).

The Laws of The Universe

In my indefatigable search for Truth and Beauty, and mostly as they relate to business, I study the Laws of The Universe, with particular emphasis on some of the least understood laws, to wit: 

The Laws of The Universe
This Law:	States this principle:
Clarke's First Law	When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Clarke's Second Law	The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Clarke's Third Law	Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Diffusion of Innovation, The Law of	2.5% innovators, 13% early adopters, 34% early majority, 34% late majority, 16% laggards.
Dilbert principle	Companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.
Dolson Principle	The higher the management level, the easier the job.
Dunbar's Number	150 is the number of people we can maintain in our relationships.
Dunning–Kruger effect	A cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
Finagle's Corollary to Murphy's Law	Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.
Foster's Law	The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders.
Hanlon’s Razor	Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hofstadter's Law	It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Jevon's paradox	The proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.
McCafferty's First Law	Do Good Now.  Make it better later.
McCafferty's Second Law	Success increases as random events are minimized.
McCafferty's Shiny Object Corollary	Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Metcalf's Law	The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.
Moore's law	The number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.
Murphy's Law	Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Occam's Razor	Simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.  Among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected.
One Percent Rule	In an online community one percent of people will create content, another 10 percent will engage with it, and the remainder will simply lurk.
O'Toole's Corollary to Finagle's Corollary	The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum
Pareto Principle (aka: the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few)	80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
Parkinson's Law	Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Parkinson's Law of Triviality	The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
Peter Principle	Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.
Putt's Law	Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.
Putt's Corollary	Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion.
Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect	The phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, often children or students and employees, the better they perform.
Snackwell effect	Dieters will eat more low-calorie cookies, such as SnackWells, than they otherwise would for normal cookies.
Software, The Many Laws	Software development obeys only its own rules, and then only maybe.
Stock-Sanford Corollary to Parkinson's Law Stuart's Law of Retroaction	If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do. It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
Student syndrome	The phenomenon that many people will start to fully apply themselves to a task just at the last possible moment before a deadline.
Sturgeon's Law, aka Sturgeon's Revelation	Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Truly Large Numbers, The Law of	Given a sample size large enough, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.

Resolutions, Goals, Plans, Systems, Habits, Self-Image

Happy New Year!
Or not.
It's up to you.


Resolutions are those promises we make to ourselves every year around this time because it seems like a good thing to do, and there are a lot of people talking about New Year's resolutions.

Resolutions are really half-promises, at best, because while we feel that we should make some resolutions, we also know the awful truth about resolutions: almost everyone fails at their resolutions. That automatically give us an out. We promise we are going to do something, or give up something, or change somehow, but we also know that we probably won't follow through because nobody does.

This attitude is guaranteed to produce zero results, but there is a way to change the way we look at resolutions so that it will become automatic that we will actually do what we want to do.

It would be helpful that we stop using the word resolutions. I carries a lot of negative baggage, what with all the failure history. How about if we use the word Goals? What's the difference? Resolutions seem to be something we say to ourselves. A wish. A hope. A Goal is something you write down, and preferably share with others (significant other, coach, good friends). If it is not written down it is just a wish. If Goals are written down, they are more likely to happen. So, first thing we do is pick up a pen and start writing. Go ahead, pick up a pen and start writing. I'll wait here...

Welcome back. And congratulations! Most people, probably north of 95% of people have no written Goals! So, automatically, you are now in the top 5% and well on your way to success. All you need to do now is start writing your future. But first, a disclaimer: just because you might have Goals at the end of this exercise, there is no reason to assume that you will actually achieve your Goals. In fact, 95% of people who have Goals will not achieve what they have written. The deck is overwhelmingly stacked against you if you proceed with the way most people set goals. 

What you will learn today is how to set Goals that become automatically self-fulfilling. 

And it all starts with the answer to a very simple question: Who am I?  Who do I want to be? What do I want my Life to look like? What am I willing to do to achieve this?

Who am I?

This step should include a written description of yourself in all positive terms, no negatives. Many people see themselves in terms of what they are Not, what they Don't Have.  

There should be a lot of Gratitude for what you do have, right now, in your life. So it all starts with a feeling, an appreciation, of Gratitude. 

Make a list of some of the things you have going for you: I have a nice smile. I am a good friend. I'm smart. I work hard. I have a good sense of humor. People like me.

It doesn't need to be a long list, just a few important positive things about yourself. You can change this list anytime you want, so this is just a quick start and gets us to the next step:

Who do I want to be?

A lot of people get stuck here. It's a fearful thing, to write down on paper who you want to be. What if you're wrong? What if what I want to be turns out to be bad in some other way? What if, what if, what if... This looping through what ifs is what stops us in our tracks. Now you know why almost all people have zero goals written down.

There is a subtle distinction in this question Who do I want to be? Many people might mistake it for What do I want? The answer to What puts us in the mode of thinking in the material world: I want a boat, a couple of really neat cars, a big house on the oceanfront, a beautiful wife and kids, and a good dog. Or whatever. We think in terms of what we don't have now, and what a good future will look like. So what happens is that we put what we want at a distance to right now. 

I propose a different solution: Think of who you want to be in terms of living an ideal life day by day. Leave the toys out of the picture, for now, please. I guarantee that the toys will come automatically if you simply become the person who is on the path to achieving his Goals.

See yourself living the life you have imagined, but without considering the toys. How do you feel, personally. Not because you have toys, but because you are living well. 

Here are a few examples of seeing your future self: 

Physically I am healthy, I feel great and look great,

because I enjoy exercise and I eat right and sleep well.

I have great friends and family relationships 

because I am a great friend.

What am I willing to DO to achieve this?

You might be tempted to answer this question in the form of 8 hours per day, or 40 hours per week. They are obvious answers to the question. That would put a limit on achieving your goals. I suggest a different approach. 

When we see ourselves as working hard now to achieve some imagined future thing, some thing that may take a long time to achieve, it is easy to give up, or to get distracted with some other shiny object, or to just get lazy for a while.

Begin with the end in mind. What is needed is a self image of being a person right now, who is On the path to the achievement of their Goals.  If I happen to be temporarily Off the path, then I simply, without any negative feelings, get back On the path. That self-image of a person who is On the path leads to the achievement of their Goals.

If I am On the path, then I see my future self as the person who created the path, and continued on the path, to create that future self. It is from that perspective of your future self that you look back and tell the story about the person you used to be. You can tell the story of your awakening, your vision of your future self, and how you set your Goals to get there. And you can then share the story, and your method, with others who need to learn this (Pay it Forward), as I am doing now.

The answer to What am I willing to do to achieve my goals is a lot simpler than you would ever expect. It's not really a lot of work at all. In fact, the secret is simply changing your mind, your attitude, your self-image. 

Adopt a self image that you are a person who goes though each day doing the things which will create the future you want. Just do it. It's important to deal with only one day at a time. 

Do what, exactly? Well, that is going to become clear once you start writing down your Goals. The awakening occurs when we fully understand that everything in life happens because of the Actions we take. This is the "scientific principle", the basis of everything we know to be true. It simply states that every condition exists because of some Action that created the condition. Every Cause has an Effect. Nothing exists without some Action that caused it. Therefore, in order for us to create some future condition or Goal, we must have caused it by our Actions. I say Actions in the plural because the Goals we want will almost certainly be the result of consistent Actions taken over Time.

We are what we repeatedly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a Habit.

Aristotle

It is really so simple: just do the things that will produce the result. Inaction produces no result.

The fist thing on the way to success is to be clear about where we are going (Write it Down), and then, every day, to refresh ourselves on where we are going by reviewing our Goals and our Plans for achieving our Goals. 

Oops, did I slip something in there, that thing about Plans? Yes, there needs to be a Plan for achieving Goals, or they are just wishes, guaranteed to remain wishes until we take Action. 

Of course, our Actions must be according to our Plans. Random actions will produce random results, Inconsistent Actions will produce inconsistent results. Planned actions have the highest probability of producing Planned results. So let's make a Plan. 

The best Plans are the things we can do every day, or most days. Every day begins a new opportunity to get on the Path, to take the right Actions, to learn from our yesterdays, and to adjust our Plans accordingly. 

The solution, then, is to get into the Habit of taking the Planned Actions that will deliver the Results (Goals).

Getting back to the Goals... The best way to write a Goal is described in the Wikipedia entry regarding S.M.A.R.T. Goals. That's all you really need to know how to write your Goals.

Now group them into Long Range (5+ years), Medium Range (2-5 years), and Short Range Goals (1 year or less). Short range goals should be grouped by quarter, monthly within the current quarter, weekly within the current month, and daily within the current week. That may sound like work, but it becomes automatic when you review your Goals daily. Start simply.

Set a Plan for what Actions you need to take in order to achieve your Goals.

Review your Plan every day, and update it, in writing, if necessary, to reflect real world conditions. 

Summary

If you do these things, you will become a Goal achieving machine. Start now, and remember that you need to focus on Daily Habits that will transform you into the person you want to be. One of those habits is to review your Goals and Plans every day, and to continually improve them.

And if you need help, just ask. I have a system that makes it easy: EZchecklist™.

-------------------------------

Additional reading from my favorite Goal achieving human, James Clear:

     Forget about Setting Goals; Focus on this instead

     Identity-Based Habits: How to Actually Stick to Your Goals This Year

     How to Transform your Habits

     How to Break a Bad Habit and Replace it With a Good One

     Achieve Your Goals: Research Reveals a Simple Trick That Doubles Your Chances for Success

     The 2-minute rule for starting new habits