I have always understood intellectually that developing habits is a good idea. In the way that you comprehend that brushing your teeth every morning and night is necessary. If you want good dental hygiene, you must form this habit. So I plodded along through life, trying to develop good habits here and there, but I found myself stuck in a vicious cycle and never quite living up to the expectation. I always thought this was because of a lack of motivation, discipline, or even a mental illness. Why can’t I just stick to something? Why do I have a string of stops and starts all the time?
Then, one day, after keeping the habit that led to this daily blog for over 90 days, I discovered that habits are the foundation on which personal transformation depends. Transformation is the compounding of multiple small, incremental habits that build until your positive success is inevitable. With habits, you are no longer dependent on fleeting and temporary things like motivation, and discipline is no longer a giant mountain that you have to climb every morning.
If you need to make a change in your life, then you must first focus on the core habits that will lead you toward that destination. The first step to improvement is always to just start walking along the path, and habit formation is that path. You may wonder: what habits should I develop to become who I want to be? The answer is surprising, because the habit itself does not matter that much.
You definitely need your initial habits to be in the same domain. For example, if I want to become a marathon runner, a habit that gets me on my feet regularly and repeatedly is absolutely necessary. If I want to become a better writer, my habit must put me in a situation where I write every day. The specific habit that you do is not as important as the habit must be getting you to engage with the principal action that a person who exhibits the qualities that you want does every day. Runners run. Writers write.
There are no magic pills and no secret ways. The beauty of the internet these days if you have no lack of people and machines feeding good ideas to you for habits that you should adopt. The reality is that picking one and doing it every day matters more than which one you pick. The key concept is doing it every day. Every day is every day, as I like to say. If your habit isn’t quite right, it will work out over time. No prescription is better for fixing behavior than repetition. When I started running every day, my mind, my body, and my lifestyle adapted to the habit. When I chose to write every day, then the same thing occurred. My entire life warped around the need to keep the habit.
You will become more efficient, faster, better over time. You will automatically gravitate toward efficiency. Your body and mind are incredibly advanced, and you will need no coaxing to figure out what is wrong and adjust. That is what humans do: adapt to change. So the first step is to force a change through habit, even if the habit is tiny to begin with.
