Chapter 2: Chapter 2: "the big change"
So how do you exactly change your life for the better? The answer is simple: step by step, by implementing small, 5-minute habits that will make you progress towards your goals. You might be tempted to think than you can't change anything with just 5 minutes a day but if you try you will be surprised with how much you've done in one year with just 5 minutes a day. Think about it: 5 minutes a day over the course of a year equates to over 30 hours, which is enough to read 3 books or to write one. I'm sure you can think of a lot of other useful things that you can do in 30 hours.
What is a habit?
Habits are essentially routines. They can be good or bad, constructive or destructive. Some examples of constructive habits include: reading, meditating, sleeping well/getting enough sleep, exercising and so on. Some examples of bad habits include: smoking, drinking alcohol, sleep deprivation and so on. Think for a minute about the things you are doing on a day to day basis, basically, about your daily routine. Are your habits good or bad? Are they useful for you or they are slowly killing you? If you are not sure whether a habit is good or bad analyze it carefully. Ask yourself: is it making me healthier or happier, is it making my life better overall? If the habit does not seem to have any benefits look for its disadvantages and you will most probably find the answer.
Why do habits work? Because once a habit is established you no longer have the mental resistance that comes with decision making. You no longer have to think about whether you want to do something or not. Once you've established a habit it becomes part of your routine, a thing that you are doing not something that you want to be doing.
How does a habit form?
Our brain loves habits and routines. It's because decision making drains its energy. That means that we are more likely to do something we have been doing for the past couple of months or years than something else because when a habit is formed our brain goes on autopilot. It knows what we should do next without consuming any energy. But it is possible to break an old habit and form a new one. You just need to approach breaking a habit the correct way. I will cover this topic later in the book. So how do you build a new habit? Let's say that you want to start exercising and you decided that you want to exercise an hour a day. That is good but it's not going to work. You will be excited for the first week or two but after that will come a day when you will not feel like exercising or just a day when you do not have the time. Days will turn into weeks and there it goes your new habit. You need to start small. You need to set yourself a task so easy to complete that you could be able to complete it even before starting to think about it. For example you can say to yourself that you are going to exercise two minutes a day. It is an easy task and you can't complain about not having the time to do it. You can always do more than two minutes if you want but if you don't want to you can just do the minimum of two minutes and you are going to fell more accomplished. Someone said: "I do not fear the man that trained punching 10000 times in one day but the man that trained punching once a day for 10000 days". Results come with time and you need to be patient about it. As I am writing this book I did not planned on writing entire chapters in one day. I would feel overwhelmed by the giant task I set to myself and decide not to write even a single word just because I can't do what I proposed to myself. Instead of writing for 5 minutes I would decide to not write at all just because I would not be able to write for an hour or two. Instead of doing that I decided to write a paragraph or phrase each and every day. Anything that comes to my mind would do. It does not be perfect the first time because I can come back and change it later. After all something is always better that nothing.
Let's say you have an upcoming exam in a month and you have to learn 30 pages. What does the majority do? Instead of learning one page a day (something that would take about 15 to 30 minutes depending on the content) they procrastinate. They feel this safety in the fact that the exam is still a months away. And there it comes the last week: they begin to feel stressed but they still don't begin to study and they keep going with the procrastination. They are totally stressed out and know that there is not enough time to learn the entire thing. They stay late and neglect sleep and after all not manage to learn even half of the material. And when you think that they needed to spend just 30 minutes a day and in the end there would have been no need for neglecting the sleep and they would have been fully prepared for the exam. Lesson: start small and keep going.
It takes 90 days for a habit to form. So you need to choose a habit to work on, set a small daily goal so that have no excuse for skipping a day and just stick to it. Except... it's not that simple. You most probably would not be able to maintain a 90 days streak first try. You either might forgot about it one day or not be at home for an entire day and that's fine. It's not the end of the world if you miss a day. The golden rule is to never miss two days in a row. The idea is to not give up. A good idea is to draw a calendar on a paper and mark with an "X" or however you'd like to the days you had exercised. First time you might get to 5 days and miss one. No worries. Just start again. The progress will fade only if give up on it definitively. Then you might get to 10 or 15 before something gets in the way. That's fine. Just start again. Eventually you will get to a point when you are on a 30+ streak and you're about to miss a day. When you lay down in your bed ready to fall asleep you suddenly remember that you have not exercised that day. You quickly jump off the bed and start exercising. You feel the need to complete the task you have set to yourself. You do not want to lose your streak. You do not want to start again. You feel accomplished when you look at your streak and think about how much progress you have made. And you probably won't jump from your bed and start exercising if you have to exercise for an entire hour. That's exactly why setting a really small goal works.
You need to remember that the calendar is in itself, a habit to maintain. For some people the calendar would be just a stressful thing and they will get demotivated whenever they miss a day, but for others a calendar will be a graphic representation of their progress and they will fill joy and fulfilment whenever they complete another day. Experiment with both a calendar and without to see which way it is easier. Also, if the calendar trick works for one habit it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to help you with all of the habits you want to implement. For example: I like to plan a couple of months of running ahead on a sheet of paper so that I know when to do certain workouts. I always write those "programs" with a pencil so that I change it later if needed. On the other hand, if I were to make a calendar for reading or meditating it would take from the joy it and I'll most probably read just for the sake of reading and not because I want to learn things or to relax. The key is to experiment as much as possible.
How to implement a habit?
The first ingredient you will need to implement a habit is "the why" - a reason to implement your habit. What are the advantages of that habit? How is your life going to look a couple of months or a couple of years from now if you decide to implement that habit? Write down at least ten reasons why you should keep going with the habit. An even better idea would be the write a detailed description of your future self if you keep up the habit and if you don't. This way, even if you happen to have a bad day you will have something to reflect on: which version of myself do I want to become? Do I want to become a loser that isn't capable of exercising for two minutes or do I want to become the fit, healthy and successful version of myself that can overcome any problems? The choice at that point should be a no-brainer. Writing down those descriptions will hopefully give you a boost in motivation by making you realize how important it is for you to not give up. If you decide to skip a day because you don't want to do something you become more likely to not do it the next day as well. Thus, days will turn into weeks and you'll come back where you were before starting. Don't let that happen! How? With the help of ingredient number two: a very easy to accomplish daily task. It's tempting to want to start exercising or running or reading for an hour a day but that just isn't sustainable from the beginning. You can do that for a month at best before burning out so you need to approach it another way: set a minimum goal small that it would be impossible not to do it. You don't need to read for an hour, or 15 minutes or 1 minute. Just open the book and read one sentence. Hard to run 1 kilometer every day? Just put your shoes on, jog for a couple of steps and go back. You might be thinking that jogging 10 meters or reading one sentence won't get you any results. And you are right in a way. However at this point the big idea is to implement the habit and make it stick. What is the way to do it? Show up daily! It doesn't matter how little you do on a particular day because it helps you implement the habit anyway. I'm not saying that you should read only one sentence a day or jog only 10 meters. All I'm saying is: don't put too much pressure on yourself, the only thing you need to do is to show up. Remember this: no matter how small, progress is progress.
Now that you set yourself a minimal task you need to decide at what time of the day you will be implementing your new habit. If you don't chose a good time you are less likely to do it. Chose a time when you know you will have free time. The best strategy however is to link the habit you want to implement to an already existing one. For example: "after lunch I'm going to read" or "before studying I will meditate". After you've successfully implemented a habit you can link another one to it. At one point my routines was: come back from school, have lunch, have a 30 minute nap, go for a run, after the run eat a fruit, read, write, code. Each time I added something new to the list it felt a bit weird and I was more likely to forget about the fact that I added something new to my routine. This, however, lasted for about two weeks and after that it felt exactly like before adding it. If you keep forgetting to do something I recommend setting an alarm, writing down your schedule or setting up a trigger, something to remind you what to do next. You can prepare your gym clothes the night before, or left an apple on your desk so that you don't forget to eat it when you come back, or left a book on your desk or bed. Try getting used to rushing into doing your habit as soon as the alarm kicks in no matter what you are doing at that time. If you say things like "I will do it in 5 minutes" or "I will do it immediately after I finish watching this video" you are most likely to forget about the habit and the alarm would be useless. Do not fall for these kind of traps.
Keep things interesting by setting yourself short-term goals. Gamify the experience and you'll be more likely not to give up. It's always fun to challenge yourself:" yesterday I ran 2 kilometers, let's see how much I can run today", "let's see how many pages I can read in a week", "I bet I will be able to run this fast by the end of this year". It doesn't need to be a big goal nor a small one. It needs to be something you think you could accomplish if you were to put the time in it.
Another way to gamify the experience is by planning ahead long-term. Make yourself a "training plan" for improving your life. What you want is to have concrete goals and to know how to accomplish them. If you do not know how then work as hard as you can to find out. Try various things and see what works and what doesn't, what helps, even if just a bit and what does not help at all or even makes things worse. Dedicate some time to reflect on your actions. Put yourself the right questions and you will find the answers you need so desperately. After you get the answers think about how to make use of them, how to implement the things that you have learned into your lifestyle. Let's say you want to become a pro runner. You start running daily and set a minimum distance you will run every day. A couple of weeks go by, some days you run more, some days you run just the minimum you have set yourself. You improve for a while and after a few months you plateau. The key is to make your research. Read books and read articles of people that are successful in the domain you are looking to improve. It would not be a smart thing to ask for financial advices from a poor person, right? Do your research well and analyze what you are doing right and what you doing wrong and look up for ways to fix your issues. Do not get discouraged when you make mistakes and something does not go according to the plan. Seek in mistakes opportunities to improve, to learn something you otherwise would most probably not.
What habits to implement?
There are two categories of habits you want to implement. In the first category fall habits like reading, meditating, exercising, eating healthy and getting enough sleep. Those are the habits that will improve your life overall, habits that will make your mind clearer and your body healthier. You can start with whatever habit you like and slowly building your way towards all of them. The second type of habits are those that are contributing towards achieving your goals. This habits will differ from person to person. You might want to learn a foreign language, or run a marathon, or write a book, or just lose a few kilograms.
Build keystone habits. What are they? Those are habits that help you develop another habits. Let's say you want to start running. So you start running daily and after a while you decide that it would be a good idea to eat healthier. Also it is pretty easy to get injured if you are running a lot and not getting enough sleep. Running gives you energy and you become more productive and motivated throughout the day. So by simply beginning to run you develop other habits that would be otherwise pretty hard to implement. The best keystone habit I can think of is running. After only a week or two of running you will become addicted to it. It gives you a ton of energy, motivation and mental clarity. Just by incorporating running into your life it would become exponentially easier to implement other habits. For example: I implemented running daily about a year ago. After I came back from school I ate, waited for half an hour than I was going for a run. After a few weeks I decided to link another habit to running. So after I came back from my running session and after I changed my clothes I sat down and read for about an hour. I was not always reading for an hour, sometimes I was reading as little as 5 pages. And was much better than deciding to not read at all because I did not had the time or the mood to read for an entire hour. But that's just me. There is a high chance that running won't as a keystone habit for you, but reading might, or meditating, or getting enough sleep. Experiment!
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