The more frequent and the less intrusive the habit, the easier it is to stick to.
Commit to writing for an hour once week? You’ll find a million reasons to procrastinate until the very last moment, on Sunday night, to write.
Commit to writing for 5 minutes once a day? The timeline is so short, there are no more excuses.
Make it doable. Make it frequent. And suddenly every habit is within reach.
When everything is urgent, how do we know what to do first?
One solution is adding more nuance:
What’s the most urgent?
What’s the most important?
Breathing is urgent.
A crying child is urgent.
A toilet visit can be urgent.
Sending that email out tonight right before bed instead of tomorrow, maybe not so much?
Here’s the important question:
If you’re going to prioritize the urgent matters anyway, why stress yourself out by calling everything urgent in the first place?
Making everything urgent devalues truly urgent matters.
Because when everything is urgent, nothing is urgent anymore.
Write before you start finding reasons not to write.
Run before you start finding reasons not to run.
Love before you start finding reasons not to love.
Before you react to what you fear in the world around you, act on what you feel in the world inside you.
Benefit and harm all depend on your perspective. The futurist John Smart suggests looking at phenomena, trends, and events through four different lenses (the “Foresight Tetrad“):
Every level has its own agenda, but their interests are rarely fully aligned.
For example: for evolution and natural selection to work, a life form must have a reasonably short lifespan, reproduce quickly, and most importantly, not clone their DNA perfectly. Because small genetic reproduction errors help a species evolve and become better adapted to our environment.
Sn an organizational/collective level (taking all of humanity together) those genetic errors are a good thing. In fact, without them, human beings in our current brain, with our current intelligence, wouldn’t even exist. Not at a species level, and not at an individual level.
But to stumble upon a couple of beneficial “genetic errors”, evolution also needs tons of harmful genetic errors.
That means that every newborn runs the risk of genetic errors that can cause medical conditions, pain, and suffering – on an individual level.
We suffer individually to evolve collectively.
Another example: in our quest to improve the condition of humanity as a whole (at the organizational/collective level), we’re harming other species and change the climate (at a global level).
Ignoring the principles the universe and the earth as an ecosystem might well lead to collapse of that ecosystem – and result in the collapse of humanity.
The universe has an agenda.
Natural selection has an agenda.
The global earth has an agenda.
Humanity as a whole has an agenda.
Individuals have an agenda.
We can’t afford to ignore any.
Thought of the day: it’s better to be proven wrong than to be paralyzed in doubt.
“Write 3 pages of Stream of Consciousness journaling.”
“Coming up with 100 things to be grateful about.”
“Publish a daily insight.”
My initial reaction, and maybe yours, is, “That’s so much.”
And that’s exactly the point.
It IS a lot.
But actually, it isn’t.
And when you try it out, and see that it isn’t, you’ve shattered the illusion of scarcity and discovered abundance.
Maybe we humans are wired to believe in scarcity and fighting over sparse food.
And while that may serve us well, in many endeavors, there’s much more abundance than we think.
If your gut reaction was, “That’s so much,” I invite you to try it out.
Write down what the voice in your head talks about for 3 entire pages.
Write down 100 things you’re grateful for.
Challenge the scarcity mindset.
There may well be abundance on the other side.
I’ve been publishing daily posts for 300+ days now.
The secret?
Writing less.
I don’t want to spend hours writing daily posts, so I keep them short.
I don’t want to drag myself to a 4-day writing session to create all posts for the coming week in advance (then not write for the rest of the week)
I don’t want to set writing goals that are painful to reach and make me feel burnt out.
I do want to write a little bit every day, so I prove to myself every single day that I’m a writer.
I do want to feel that writing that daily post is achievable and fun.
I do want to build momentum.
Keep it achievable. Keep it pleasurable. Keep it sustainable.
In other words: Tiny Trust Builders.
