Make your habits easy to stick to by making them tiny.
Make your habits tiny to make it easy to build self-trust.
Make your habits part of your identity, so that you’re not scared to answer the following question anymore:
Did you do it or not?
When progress seems slow
Maybe even invisible
And still, every day you show
That you know
Where you’re going
That’s where you truly grow.
On the days when I feel like everything I write is bad, I choose to be a writer.
On the days when I feel like the most inspired writer, I choose to be a writer.
On the days when I need to skip a day because life gets in the way, I choose to be a writer.
On the days when I don’t feel like a writer, I choose to be a writer.
And especially on the days when I don’t write, I choose to be a writer by trusting that soon enough, I’ll write again.
I choose to be a writer, not through pressuring myself into hardliner habits but through my daily commitment to the general direction I want my life to take.
Focus on making the majority of your actions and decisions align with who you want to be.
When you do that, you’ll always bounce back.
In the series of self-sabotaging behavior I’ve observed in myself and others: “pre-emptively disqualifying yourself”.
Before you even start, you’re depriving yourself already of any potential benefit of the exercise because you don’t know if you’ll get the EXACT benefit promised/desired by you.
“This exercise might have cured your neck pain, but I’ve always had neck problems, it won’t chage anything.”
“You might be able to write every day, but for me, in my situation, that would never be possible.”
This shows a lack of understanding of learning principles. Because with any exercise, program, diet, methodology, you’ll never get the exact same results as someone else, because you can never replicate the exact circumstances and actions of a person.
Instead, you do the exercise/program/diet/… within the framework of your own personal context/skills/past experience. Within that context, it will guide your learning process. But the outcome resulting from it is personal.
Variance is to be expected, and this is a good thing. Because this is how innovation happens: actions in different types of circumstances lead to slightly different results. Sometime that leads to disappointment, sometimes to real breakthroughs.
Getting different results, then, is not a reason to pre-emptively disqualify yourself, or to claim something doesn’t work. Because the true value doesn’t lie in getting the exact same results as someone else, but rather, to consciously set the general direction of our lives.
Every day, we have to make so many decisions that lead us down different future paths, so modeling someone and using their actions as a guiding principle will greatly increase the probability of you going in the direction you desire, and getting results in the same ballpark.
For example, I’ve been doing Dylan Werner’s yoga classes on Alo Moves (my go-to online yoga/fitness/meditation app) consistently for almost two years now. Even if I continue to follow his exact schedule for two more years, chances are, I still might not be able to do something like this:
After all, we have a different body structure, different gene disposition, different circumstances, and I’ll have to adapt his schedule to my personal capacity.
Still, if I follow his schedule I’ll definitely become much stronger and healthier than if I chose to model a couch potato, watch TV and eat fries and burgers all day. And that’s what it’s all about.
Modeling, in that point of view, are an effective way to accelerate your progress and lead your life in the direction you want, without you having to know exactly which results you’ll get.
In other words: when you let go of the need to predict exact future outcomes, you can stop pre-emptively disqualifying yourself, and start pro-actively setting the direction of your life.
It’s easy to be non-violent when you’re in a flower garden
Josh Waitzkin – The art of learning
It’s easy to be kind to others when the world has always been kind to you.
It’s easy to say you want to be a writer when you never really put yourself out there to prove it.
To learn writing, I must confront the uncomfortable parts of writing – and learn not to respond by running away from it.
To learn non-violence, I must confront violence – and learn not to respond with violence in return.
To learn kindness, I must confront being hurt – and learn not to use that as an excuse to perpetuate the cycle of hurt.
To build trust in myself, I must stay true to my values under difficult conditions.
Whether you believe you can write today or not, remember: there’s no physical law, not even a mental barrier stopping you from putting pen to paper or opening your phone or laptop and writing.
Start like this: “I am writing.”
Do it now.
Then keep going.
See?
Believe whatever you want. Change your beliefs however often you want. Your innate ability to write is steady.
And if you know that, why wouldn’t you align your beliefs with your innate ability?
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.
