Habits are the building blocks of life.
Much of what we do each day happens automatically as the result of our habits. And if our character is shaped by our day-to-day actions, then who we are is determined to a large degree by our habits.
A virtue can be defined as a good habit built up through repeated good actions, while a vice is a bad habit reinforced through repeated bad actions. Virtues and vices shape our character, little by little, like the blows of a chisel on stone, revealing a sculpture.
It’s a sobering thought, but, to some extent, the story of our lives is written by the little actions that we perform (or don’t perform) each day. And we often don’t notice while it’s happening. Habits expert James Clear observes in his book “Atomic Habits” that “habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. ... They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.”
Don’t Get Impatient for Results
One of the main reasons that people forsake new habits is that they start to think the new habit isn’t doing any good. They’re not seeing the results that they’d hoped for. As Clear puts it, “We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous routines.”But the truth is that we’re often not being realistic about how long it takes to effect real change. Clear writes: “We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done. This can result in a ‘valley of disappointment’ where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. However, this work was not wasted. It was simply being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed.”
Form 1 Habit at a Time
Tackling too much at once is my Achilles’ heel when it comes to habit formation. When I first read James Clear’s “Atomic Habits,” I was on fire with enthusiasm. I finally had a system to form habits! Eager to test-drive the principles in the book, I set out on an ambitious plan of self-reform, with at least half a dozen habits on the docket all at once.Unsurprisingly, I failed at pretty much all of them. I tried to rush things. Habits take time, as noted above. It isn’t necessary—or even feasible—for most of us to develop multiple new habits all at once.
Suppose that you focused on a single habit for an entire month—not skipping a single day, but not worrying about all of the other habits you want to form. You’d likely have enough repetitions to develop a pretty good habit. With that month under your belt, you could then turn to the next habit on your list.
Instead of Relying on Willpower, Change the Situation
Willpower can be built up through repetition like any other habit. But sometimes a better strategy for sticking to a resolution is to create an environment that minimizes opportunities to break a good habit or fall into a bad one. In an article for Time magazine, professors of psychology Jay van Bavel and Dominic Packer write: “Psychologists who study self-control have advice about how best to stick to our goals. The worst approaches involve ... white-knuckling it as you stare down temptation. Good old will power.”Instead, according to a review of 102 studies, the best strategy is to avoid temptations altogether. This is called “situation change.” Van Bavel and Packer write, “Rather than exposing ourselves to temptations and hoping we possess the willpower to resist, it is better to avoid confronting them in the first place.”
Concretely, this means taking actions ahead of time that support your habits. For instance, you might remove social media apps from your phone to prevent you from wasting time on them—that way you won’t even have the option to do so. Or if you want to exercise more, you might schedule it on your calendar and prepay a gym membership or class so you’re already committed in terms of both time and money.
Find Like-Minded People
One of the best ways to maintain a habit is to find people who will hold you accountable. Van Bavel and Packer refer to research that found social norms to be a powerful motivator when it comes to maintaining good habits or breaking bad ones. One study found that placing students in a classroom with social norms that discouraged tech usage was more effective than directing them to make private resolutions to avoid tech.
Clear says the same thing. One of his rules for habit development is to “join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.”
Similarly, Olson writes about the “law of association.” He states that your income level tends to be the average of your five closest friends. This law of association also applies to many areas of life besides finances; for example, your level of health will likely be about the average of your five best friends. The same goes for your career success.
This flows from the social nature of human beings—we gravitate toward the behaviors we witness in the group that we belong to. So if you want to make a good habit or crush a bad one, find like-minded people who already behave the way that you want to behave. Create or join a positive culture.
