The next time you’re falling short of a goal, look to high-achieving peers for answers. If you’d like to get more sleep, a well-rested friend with a similar lifestyle may be able to help. If you’d like to commute on public transit, don’t just look up the train schedules—talk to a neighbor who’s already abandoned her car. You’re likely to go further faster if you find the person who’s already achieving what you want to achieve and copy and paste their tactics than if you simply let social forces influence you through osmosis.

This is one of those posts where I think to myself, “I wish I had come up with this myself many, many years ago and saved myself a ton of needless hard work.”

I’ve been getting a chance to (unintentionally) put this into practice at my new job. We hired a Ruby on Rails developer who is just incredible at what he does, and I had the chance to work alongside him a couple days this past week.

Seeing him work Vim, for example, already makes me want to start exploring it. And that’s a piece of tech that has intimidated me for two decades now.

Notice also that many of these examples will have negative feedback built into them as well: I get a bad grade, my habit app streak ends, I feel embarrassed that my friends know I haven’t exercised for a week, my task list is neverending and makes me feel overwhelmed, my coach might criticize what I did today, I forgot to do the language lesson and feel bad about it.

So if most systems have both positive and negative feedback built in … what can we do?

We have to design a better system.

Essentially, you should start rewarding yourself when things are going well, and have compassion for yourself when they are not. Then, the next day, give yourself a micro-task to accomplish. Reward yourself accordingly and get back on track.