Let me start by saying that I am a huge fan of good habits. I’ve applied habits in the past to just about every aspect of my life, with emphasis on different arenas at different times where it’s seemed appropriate or necessary. There’s no doubt in me that the relative success I have experienced in my relatively short life have been partly supported by good habits.
Now, some constructive criticism.
As great as new habits are for turning our life around, habits maintained for their own sake can be the most detrimental elements to creating a better life.
Like many of those that I hear and see in a huge number of articles quoting books referring to studies, etc., I too have had a history before of over-dependence on what habits I do or don’t have as my reasons for achieving or not achieving certain goals in my life.
What do I mean, you say?
As great as new habits are for turning our life around, habits maintained for their own sake can be the most detrimental elements to creating a better life.
In my case, the process of deciphering and implementing “good habits” was almost an addiction. I would spend hours upon hours designing different ways of structuring them, of analyzing my habits and forging ones that made sense for certain categories of my life. (I even tried offering my more and more rigid structure to others to model after…who knows why that wasn’t received well!?)
But the truth is, if we’re talking about meeting real goals in any particular field of study or arena of our lives, habits are only meant to support us in getting there, not substitute the drive and passion for committing to the results you need.
The Importance of Absolutely Getting Off Track
Whether you are a believer in the concept of “flow,” or you’re simply aware of the difference between most short attention span activities and those activities necessary to execute better strategies, the fact is that you cannot always control the way to real success or achievement of what you want. Sometimes, regardless of how “sustainable” the habit seems, you may have to do something that doesn’t fit into your life well in order to get the job done.
Let me give you an example.
The first book I’ve ever successfully written (pending publishing) was fully supported by a very helpful habit of coming home every evening, waiting until the hour when my wife was in bed, putting on my headphones, and turning out all lights besides my computer screen and a dim lamp to prevent me from going cross eyed. Then I would begin hitting the keyboard with all the passion and fury of a pianist performing a Rachmaninov concerto.
The first few nights were the hardest, but I was determined to hit my numbers — a minimum of 1500 words a night toward a total of 48,000 words (the length of the average modern fiction novel). I created a spreadsheet template for my figures that helped me track my progress each night, and as time passed, it got easier and easier to reach each milestone. It became such that I was more likely to skip on dinner on a given evening (and potentially breakfast the next morning) than miss a night of writing.
The the number of words I was looking to habitually hit each night gave me a nice push in the direction of what I wanted to get done. But what actually help to me achieve those numbers was anything but needing a push. Once the keystrokes started coming, it was all I could do to stop before my sleep deprived eyelids set my forehead into the computer screen. I became so absorbed in what I was doing, nothing else matters.
The end result? In just two months, I had a book that was 154% longer than what I had originally predicted writing when I’d designed my project: 74,147 words.
Similar cases have been true for me when it came to learning Japanese, getting my black belt in taekwondo, hitting the floor running on a new job I had little to no prior experience in, learning how to build websites and online marketing pipelines, studying species identification in nature awareness, and so on.
Yes, there were habits involved, but the best part of the process wasn’t integrating a new habit into an already functional lifestyle. It was engaging in a complete mind-altering time warp that would always nearly throw me from the so-called “reality of life” into new frontiers that demanded my full desire and complete focus to achieve.
Regardless of actual full mastery of a skill or subject of study, the real key to achieving some goals is not simply sustaining a manageable habit each day, as many blog articles and “coaches” will tell you. It’s getting off one track of life and getting on another. It’s allowing your complete attention to be sucked into a project, making it into a full-blown mission as it were, and doing whatever it takes to get the results you designed the goal for in the first place.
Unless of course your goal is to simply keep up good habits, for their own sake.
Avoid Habitual Habit-Setting
My reasoning here may seem kind of wonky, but I truly believe that the power of new skills and gifts has everything to do with goal-setting and instilling passion in the activities for that goal rather than creating habits and hoping those alone, if sustained, will be enough.
I’ve known plenty of people whose one goal is simply up hold all the habits they wish they could to make their lives better.
When you get real about how life works, though, very rarely does anyone maintain any one habit their entire lives — and this is not a bad thing.
When habits are sustained for their own sake, the likeliness of upholding them significantly diminishes.
The question becomes, did the habit he or she implemented help in achieving what they wanted? Did maintaining it long enough support them in achieving their results? Or did their habit simply start to take on a life of its own before it petered it out into just one more thing to feel guilty or dissatisfied about?
There are plenty of examples of this.
The yoga newcomer who gives into accompanying her friends out of a sense of peer pressure and is teased only months later for not being able to hold up for more than a week. The young corporate worker who drives an hour’s commute, remaining steadfastly diligent about arriving 30 minutes before and leaving 30 minutes after work hours, burning out in lieu of a deeper purpose for what he’s doing. A child forced to stick to the habitual pattern of coloring her picture trees green instead of the sapphire blue she knows them to sometimes be.
When habits are sustained for their own sake, the likeliness of upholding them significantly diminishes, and the goal in mind starts to feel even farther away and even irrelevant.
Often the one thing we really need in order to make our habits work for us — instead of conforming to the disillusioned popular opinion of good and bad things to do for your health, wealth, etc. — is simply some definition.
When you define the purpose of doing something everyday, or once a week, or whatever time you have to give it, and hold yourself accountable to maintaining it if only to allow yourself the opportunity to complete immerse yourself in the activities that bring real results, you’re more likely to not only achieve your goals but surpass your own expectations.
Trust me, it’s something worth making a habit of.