As we explored earlier this week, becoming wealthy isn’t easy. Neither is being healthy. Accumulating wealth, like a disciplined diet, requires hard choices. To grow both our wealth and health, we have to prioritize our future selves over our desire for instant gratification. There is a recipe for success that applies as much to a strong diet as it does a solid investment plan. It has two main ingredients: automation and friction.

When to Choose Your Lunch 

It’s 12 PM, you’re starving, and every online menu looks amazing. Are you really going to choose a salad over a burger and fries? I’m certainly not. But if you packed your lunch the night before, you’re much less likely to cave in to those greasy temptations. Plus, planning your meal ahead eliminates the difficult choice in the heat of the moment because you automate the decision.

Use Friction to Your Advantage

In the book The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor talks about the power of friction. To reduce his bad habit of watching too much TV, he dialed up the friction by removing the batteries from his remote and putting them in a drawer across the room. (I’ve tried this before and it worked quite well buying me time to realize the best decision, not the easiest one.) Conversely, when Achor wanted to exercise more, he decreased the friction of a good choice by laying out his workout clothes next to his bed the night before. One less good decision to make when half asleep.

Making Wealth Easier

The more good decisions required to succeed, the greater the chance our plan goes sideways. To tilt the odds in our favor, we need to pursue two objectives. Reduce the number of steps to make a good decision and put more blockades in front of bad choices or habits. Here’s a few examples to grow your wealth:

1. Set up an automatic transfer from your paycheck to your savings accounts and/or 401k so there’s no good decision needed each month. The best savers prioritize setting a savings goal first, then live on the rest.
2. Establish an automated rebalancing plan for your investment portfolio so you don’t have to make the difficult decision to sell winners and buy losers when emotions want to steer us in the opposite direction.
3. Delete your investment account app on your phone so it’s harder to look at and tinker with your portfolio. Remember, less is more when it comes to looking at your portfolio.
4. Delete the stock market app on your phone too. See above. If you’re a long-term investor, the market’s movement today, next week, or next month is less valuable than the cost of frequently watching.
5. Create a financial plan. It’s hard to get to your destination if you don’t know where you’re going. Consider a financial plan the GPS for your money.

By adding automation and using friction to your advantage, individuals can increase the chance of achieving their goals. At the same time, they can eliminate the need to make decisions in the most emotional, irrational moments regarding both their wealth and health.

Castle Quote: “Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound and turn into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.” – James Clear, author of Atomic Habits