Lately, I have been thinking about how some people in the world are proficient at various skills and have mastered them completely while others struggle to do simple things in day-to-day life. A most common narrative for success is you work hard continuously and someday you can reap the benefits. This is one of the most absurd things I have heard in my life. Does this mean, you will enjoy the benefits of your success when you are sixty years old and about to kick the bucket. I know that might sound harsh, but it is simply not it. Success is constituted by many factors like a good work ethic, deciphering your strengths and weaknesses, being lucidly aware of things you can do and not do and building useful habits that compound to produce herculean results(fancy word usage!). But this blog will talk about habits.
When you look at all successful people like self-made billionaires, they all have robust habits that play a vital role in their success. For instance, Mark Cuban billionaire entrepreneur, and owner of the NBA club Dallas Mavericks says that he reads about four to five hours a day according to an article published in CNBC in 2018. This proves the fact that just reading one day or whenever you feel like it will not benefit you, things like this are done day in and day out. As habits are built over time, you do not have to consciously think to do it or have a colossal amount of motivation to push through, preserve and persist( I am trying to sound like those motivational speakers). You do not need the motivation to brush your teeth or eat breakfast in the morning, you just do it without having any thought. How is this possible and what is to learn from this you may ask?
Habits are meant to be simple like brushing your teeth, it is a facile task, but they might have been difficult to do at once. When I first embarked on my quest to build useless habits- I failed. I just came up with an unrealistic way of doing things like reading a hundred pages a day, workout for two hours and so on. We, humans, are programmed to see results instantaneously hence we try to do things with intensity hoping for a change. But the bad news is: it does not work like that. You do things consistently over the long term to see changes. The prominent mistake I made was trying to do things in maximum intensity and quantity and it did not produce results any quicker, I probably could not stick to it for more than three days. Why? Because I expected myself to gain muscles and also become some radical intellect (don’t ask me why). To get long-term success in any field, you have to put in consistent work with a focus on the process. The goal is just a temporary state but the process builds a solid experience.
So what did I learn from this journey of starting to build habits? Firstly, start simple and easy. You do not have to do things that are the most stressful, make it as easy as possible because the simpler and easier it is the more likely you will do it. To explain this better you would continue to read five pages a day for a certain amount of time than reading fifty pages a day and lose all interest in just two days. Never fall into this cycle of having unrealistic habit-building aims. Getting back on track gets super hard. Secondly, make it fun and interesting so that you will genuinely enjoy doing it, at the end of the day you do not want to hate yourself for building this habit. The more you enjoy it, the more likely you will continue doing it. When starting these habits we cannot cognize the benefit that would be received from doing activities at a very less intensity and pace, however when you think about doing 1% is better than doing nothing or spending time on negative habits, you can choose steep decline to continual linear increment. The last important factor is reducing resistance. Resistance is the friction that you experience before doing a certain task, there are friction factors. For instance, if you are trying to learn guitar every day, keep your guitar in your sight so that every time you see it, it reminds you to practice. Habits are relatively easier to build when you make them simple and easier. Gamify the experience of habit building which is a key component that involves increasing your intensity with time as you get used to it.
- Jeshurun
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