The Power of habit

“Once you built your habits and then your habits built you”

The importance of habit!

Success is the product of daily habits, not once-in-a-lifetime transformations All big things come from small beginnings. With the same habits you will get the same result so to improve in life you have to build better habits as they are the key to better results.

The best insight of our habits is: that you don’t need to be aware of the cue for a bit to begin. You can notice an opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it. Like one has a good habit of learning, he can’t always explain what it is or why he is learning, but the learning is happening along the way.

How small changes make a big difference!

It is rightly said that we often overestimate the power of 1 day but also underestimate the power of a month if we make small improvements every day. If we get 1% better every day we will be 37 times better after 1 year. Habits help in compounding these improvements.

Let’s take an example

Suppose you have some ice cubes in a room where the temperature is 24 degrees, and you start heating the room slowly. The temperature rises to 27, then to 28 nothing happens. 29, 30, and then 31, ice cubes are still sitting no change! but as the temperature reaches 32 then BOOM, Ice suddenly starts melting. That's the power of compounding. It works exactly in the same way with habits as in 1 or 2 months it will change nothing but can change the entire landscape in a year.

Another hidden power of the habits

Every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you want.

Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit. Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm. Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly. You don’t want the habit itself. What you want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle -that is, the more difficult the habit- the more friction there is between you and your desired end state. This is why it is crucial to develop good habits as your habits will make the process so easy that you’ll do all the hard work without even realizing that you are doing any kind of work.

Difference between good and bad habits

Labeling your habits as good or bad is a bit complex. The labels “good habit” or “bad habit” is slightly inaccurate. There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits or non-effective ones. That is Effective ones solve your problems and other ones create a problem in a long term. All habits serve you in some way- even the bad ones-which is why you repeat them.

Generally speaking, good habits will have net positive results. Bad habits have net negative ones. Smoking a cigarette may reduce stress right now(that’s how it's serving you), but it’s not healthy long-term behavior. Meanwhile reading a self-help book can be an uphill task right now but will give you a lot of benefits in a long term.

Why don’t we stick with good habits and why bad habits are easier to follow than good ones?

In modern society, many of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. If you do a good job at work, you’ll get a paycheck in a few weeks. If you exercise today, perhaps you won’t be overweight next year. If you save money now, maybe you’ll have enough for retirement decades from now. You live in what scientists call a delayed-return environment because you can work for years before your actions deliver the intended payoff. but the human brain is not evolved for life in a delayed-return environment. The world has changed much in recent years, but human nature has changed little. This bias toward instant gratification causes problems. Hence the consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate. Smoking might kill you in ten years, but it reduces stress ad eases your nicotine cravings now. Sex-safe or not-provides pleasure right away. Disease and infection won’t show up for days or weeks, even years. Often the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits. In other words, the cost of your good habits is in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future. What is immediately rewarded is repeated, What is immediately punished is avoided. That’s why we stick to the bad ones due to the immediate gratification that they provide us.

Why changing our habits is challenging?

1. We try to change the wrong thing.
2. We try to change our habits in the wrong way.

We make a few changes and expect results quickly and as we don’t see anything in short term we return to our old routine as a single decision is easy to dismiss and we give no second thought to changing it.

Problems with goalsetting!

The thing is that both winners and losers have the same goal but I can bet they would have a different system that they are working on to reach that goal. When we are so goal-focused we focus only on outcomes(results) and often ignore the process so we not only don’t get the desired outcome but also sometimes follow unfair means in trying to get it. It doesn’t come to our mind that to change output we have to change the input and also even if we win in the short term we almost always miss the bigger picture.

Example- Your goal is to get 99%in a particular semester and you work hard and get results but its downside is that once you reached the specific target and will have an instant high dopamine hit but the problem is that you will lose all the inspiration as you achieved a milestone. But now think that your goal now is not to get 99% but to study 6 hours each day or to Wake up early every day to study. By doing this you will get not only get good results maybe 99% but also will help you to sustain in the future too and will help you to achieve greater results without any friction or craving but also you will never feel a lack of motivation. You will become purpose-focused, not goal-focused which is better in long term.

In a nutshell,

It’s all our habits that create our future or either destroy it so if you want to be successful in your life watch out for what habits you have and do they require some modifications or whether need to develop some new good habits and eliminate bad ones.