Justin Kan's Habits for Success
TQD: Issue 02
Welcome to The Quest Digest: a weekly publication for The Quest podcast (hosted by Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch)!
You’ll receive: exclusive community access 🗣 , personal insights from the mind of Justin 🧠 , episode deep-dives 🤿 , Quest Minutes articles ⏳, community submissions, exciting opportunities to work with us, and much more.
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What’s up everyone! Happy weekend, hope everyone is staying safe 💪🏼
This week on The Quest:
Our special guest is…Justin Kan! This is the first episode of Quest University, a mini-series in which Justin shares his personal life lessons and wisdom with you (the stuff they don’t teach you at school). Oh and did we mention its completely free?
Today, we’re taking a deep dive into his learnings and lessons from James Clear’s New York Times best-seller Atomic Habits.
If you missed the episode, don’t worry - we’ve got you covered:
But first…what’s new?
🚀 1000+! TQD to the moon!
In just 1 week since the launch of The Quest Digest, we’ve reached almost 1100 subscribers. That’s just f*#%!ng insane.
Keep sharing TQD to people who might be interested - we’re cooking up some huge things and we don’t want anyone to miss out! We want to build this newsletter with you, so let us know what you want to see and we’ll make it happen.
📹 Justin Kan is a YouTuber now?
That’s right! Make sure to subscribe to his channel for weekly personal vlogs, helpful videos and exciting content - first video goes live next Thursday (Jan. 28) so don’t miss out. Here’s a sneak peek… 👀
⏳ Lastly…TQM!
These newsletter publications are longer than we initially thought, especially with Quest Minutes included. So we’re going to be trying a new scheduling format to make sure you guys are getting the content you want to see without being overwhelmed.
Moving forward, The Quest Digest will be split into two emails per week. It will look something like this:
Tuesday: You will receive a dedicated email for The Quest Minutes article of the week. This way, you will have access to a summary of the episode as soon as it is released.
Saturday/Sunday: The Quest Digest newsletter - includes personal insights and knowledge drops from Justin Kan himself, highlights of content across our channels, community submission features (more on this later), and important announcements / updates.
Whew, that was a lot of updates. Now let’s check out what Justin had in store for us this week!
🧠 Forming Habits with Justin Kan
'“I’ll probably do it tomorrow.”
Sound familiar? If you’re like me, you probably know a thing or two about chronic procrastination. ‘Later’ never seems to come around, and once again you find yourself 14 hours deep into a caffeine fueled all-nighter electric boogaloo to hand in that task that’s due in 30 minutes.
You might be shocked to learn that Justin struggled with this too:
“I was always a procrastinator when I was a kid and young adult. I always felt like I wasn't able to affect real change in my life…That was kind of the way I thought I was going to be for the rest of my life.”
In case you haven’t had a chance to read Atomic Habits (you should), Justin shares how he implemented five core ideas from the book that have impacted his life and helped him develop better habits. We got a great response on Twitter, but we’d also like to share his thoughts here.
❗️Make it obvious. To change behavior, put up cues in your environment as a constant reminder. Justin built a home gym and now he can’t escape from daily exercises. Something similar I do is structuring my grocery list to prioritise healthy foods at the top so I grab them first. I limit ‘cheat’ foods to one item at the bottom as an add-on.
❤️ Make it attractive. You want to sugarcoat the pain. Justin puts his phone, with Twitter and other social media apps in his gym (yes, he was in the gym while tweeting). It’s punishing, but works because the incentive is very compelling.
😎 Make it easy. Remove temptations from your environment so you waste less mental effort to say ‘no’. High carb food sucks. “But carbs are soooooo hard to resist,” I hear you say. Don’t keep them in the house then. Need to go out of my way to get it. It becomes easier to comply with than to break the habit. Be ruthless!
😋 Make it satisfying. Our brain is wired to respond to feedback loops and you can build one for yourself - this is a very effective hack. Find something you enjoy, tie it to a measurable goal, then indulge yourself whenever you achieve the goal with no exceptions. In other words:
“My hope is that this has been helpful to you. I did not start off as someone who could easily change habits. This new understanding of habit formation has really changed my life more than any other thing has. More than being successful in the outside world.”
If you found this helpful or know anyone who might, do them a favor and share this post with them! (NOTE: Recommending The Quest Digest to a friend has been reported to be a perfectly acceptable method of repaying owed favors and settling outstanding debts).
👀 Coming up next…
16.7 million followers ✅ 240 million views ✅
TikTok sensation Bryce Hall joins Justin next week on The Quest to share his story from being bullied in school to becoming one of the Internet’s most recognizeable icons. Episode drops 26 Jan. 9AM PST. See you there. 👋🏼
Make sure to share and subscribe to The Quest Digest to never miss announcements, opportunities, and personal insights from Justin!
-Felix