Being successful is about brushing your teeth
Harness the power of habit to benefit you
Getting a kid to brush their teeth is annoying, it’s a hassle and without reminders they often skip it.
But as adults we rarely forget. It’s odd to even think about not brushing our teeth, a sign of something going wrong if anything. What was once a hassle is now consistently done, the exact same activity.
There is power in this.
It’s not that we have suddenly gotten more disciplined, or that we are necessarily putting more inherent value in the activity, we’re just tapping into the power of habit.
We think that we are in control of our actions. But while it is possible to be in complete control of your actions, that is itself a choice. The choice to consciously choose or not. And one we often don’t make.
While we do use our conscious brain to focus on “important” tasks (in the sense of what feels important at the time, not in what may actually be important).what we don’t realize is the vast majority of our actions and day to day behaviors arise from habit not conscious decisions.
There is who you are and there are your habits. If you are not doing what you want or what makes you happy, that isn’t because you are somehow flawed, it is because the habits you have built up and the unconscious actions they promote are not aligned with your core desires and values. If they were, you would not feel that tension.
You are not necessarily your actions but your actions are your reality.
When we think about the effect habit has on our lives, it is usually talking about bad habits. But if instead your habits were aligned with your goals and desires, you would be much more likely to achieve those.
We talk about “being stuck in your ways” as a negative thing, as getting in the way of success, but what if the “ways” you are stuck in are actually good for you?
That’s where we want to get to but for most of us, the negative impact of our bad habits outweighs the positive impact of our good habits. How do we transform one to the other? The answer is we don’t.
The first step is to be more conscious, more self-aware. You have to first consciously pay attention what you are really doing, kick yourself out of that automated habit state, because right now it is working against you.
You focus on the actual actions you are doing and in particular on those regular actions which are having a negative impact, your “bad” habits.
The next logical step may seem to then stop doing those habits. And you can do that for a little while but that is not sustainable. If we could easily change our habits, then there would be no point to having them.
So rather than trying to eliminate bad habits, what we need to do is instead promote good habits. The only effective way to stop a habit is to replace it with another habit. To put in some initial conscious effort to bend our habit machine towards actions that promote our goals and happiness.
This is hard to do for two reasons, one is what we’ve already mentioned which is that our bad habit is a habit. But the other is that the way our resistance to change works most effectively to promote habits is via our imaginations.
At some level we imagine the work to do this opposing good habit to be overwhelming. We’re not actually thinking about the work it takes but more feeling of it being a huge task. But most of the time, when we get into it, it is very rarely even as close to being as uncomfortable as we imagine it to be.
This is the hard work of setting up a good habit, putting effort into transforming our imagined discomfort, which is potentially unlimited, to a real discomfort which is inherently limited and as such is less overwhelming. We know exactly how much effort to expend.
And each time we do this action, it reinforces it to become habitual. The discomfort of not doing the action starts to catch up to the discomfort of doing the action. And when it finally exceeds it, that is when you’ve established this new habit.
But the real magic happens when you see the long term results of this good habit. A bad habit is always working against your happiness and only sustains itself when there isn’t a good habit that is overcoming it.
But a good habit has the benefit of increasing our happiness and satisfaction and so becomes more sticky. When you take the time to establish them, good habits are actually easier to maintain.
It’s not easy to do, but the power of habit is the real way to accomplish anything. Make sure it’s working for you and not against you.
