What’s the one Tiny Trust Builder you can do for yourself; one little thing thing that makes you feel good about yourself, and because you feel good, you’re good to other around you too?
What’s that one small constraint YOU decide to put on your day that, when protected fiercely, makes everything else so much better?
And if you know it makes everything better and you aren’t protecting it fiercely yet – why not?
Could you start today?
The trick to successful habit-building: make daily practice easy.
We often do the opposite: we make weekly practice hard.
If I tell myself I’m going to post one long blog post every week, I’ll find a million reasons not to write for the first six days until I have no choice but to write.
But if I tell myself I will post daily, the longest I can procrastinate is… 12 hours?
And after a week, I’ve practiced my publishing habit 7 times.
So it goes for meditation, yoga, running, and any skill or habit.
Make the daily practice easy.
Within a split second, I’ve categorized an object as an apple. Now I don’t pay attention to the dimensions, color, smell, and texture anymore.
Within a split second, I’ve categorized an emotion as anger, fear, frustration, love. So I don’t pay attention to the physiological changes in my body anymore.
I’m always categorizing – but I didn’t consciously create the categories.
But what if I’m categorizing inaccurately?
Can I interrupt instant categorization, governed by language, habits, patterns, past experience?
Can I re-open my senses and see, smell, touch, hear, feel again?
Can I start sensing nuances between the objects I behold?
Can I discern nuances between the feelings I feel?
Mindfulness, journaling, meditation, and learning languages can help with more conscious categorization.
Because what if the anger I feel is nothing but fear?
What if the fear I feel is nothing but frustration?
What if the frustration I feel is nothing but unrequited love?
And what if the love I feel is nothing but infatuation?
Today, you’ll force yourself to chase fulfilment, not instant pleasure.
Because when you start getting the taste what’s on the other side of your avoidance…
Soon enough you won’t need brute force anymore.
You don’t need a motivational speech.
But you may need a reminder of who you choose to be, and what the person you choose to be would do right now.
And once you remember, you’ll have all the motivation you need.
Here’s a question Tim Ferris asks startup founders (and himself) when deciding to invest time and money into a new project:
“If, in one (or two, or three) years from now, this whole project has failed miserably… Which assumptions you hold today were proven wrong?”
Tim Ferris
Answering the question first requires defining failure and success.
For my project of publishing a daily insight on this blog success looks like this:
Write & publish.
Edit.
Write & publish.
Edit.
Then write & publish some more.
Good, bad, well-received or not, received or read by anyone at all, it doesn’t matter.
Because first of all, writing is a creative outlet for me.
Second: long as I write & publish consistently, I trust I will get better at writing and publishing.
Finally: I trust that from all that sculpting away, day by day, will come better and better insights.
A pretty low bar for success – which, counterintuitively, often leads to more progress long-term.
Now we have established that:
What are the assumptions that could be wrong if next year, it turns out I failed to write & publish every day?
Here are some I can think of:
Will these assumptions be proven wrong?
Only time will tell.
Until then… I write & publish… then write & publish some more.
Giving it your best doesn’t mean you’ll always create your best work.
But when you give it your best daily and you zoom out, you’ll notice how, slowly but surely, your best work becomes better and better.
And that’s all that matters.
