Photograph by Coen Van den Broek
"We are what we repeatedly do.” - Aristotle
There was a time in my life where I was running about six miles a day, nearly every day. I didn’t become that annoying person overnight.
The first time I went out on a run, it was on a track at a community college near my childhood house. The loop was one-quarter mile, so I had to run around it four times to complete a mile. In that first time, I couldn’t run around the loop once without stopping. I only ran/walked a mile that day.
Then the next day, I woke up and ran/walked another mile.
I slowly progressed, but before I realized it, I could run a mile without stopping - eventually, I could easily run six.
I was in college at the time, and my friends watched me transform into this person - a runner - a person who regularly sought out a runner’s high. Due to this habit that I built, people would love to tell me how motivated I was and how I had much more willpower than they had. I didn’t argue, but I also didn’t recognize that they were wrong. It wasn’t willpower or motivation that guided me, I had simply built a habit. The habit became so ingrained that I created a new identity surrounding it.
Why willpower doesn’t work
Willpower relies on motivation and decision-making. It is a finite resource that requires you to use your mental faculties to either convince yourself to do something or talk yourself out of doing something. It’s exhausting, and when it inevitably doesn’t work, you blame yourself.
Decision-making, like willpower, and automatic behaviors like habits happen in two different parts of the brain. Neuroscientists have discovered that the part of the brain where decision-making happens is the prefrontal cortex; the basal ganglia is responsible for forming habits. The basal ganglia also plays a key role in developing pattern recognition, memories, and emotions. Once a behavior becomes automatic and habitual, the decision-making part of your brain isn’t involved anymore. It effectively checks out and goes on autopilot.
Here’s why this is an incredible advantage: we can form habits that require complex behavior while only using minimal brain activity. In other words, our brains already possess the mechanisms that allow us to stop relying on willpower and default to habits.
The Habit Loop: Understand whats driving you
According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 45% of our behaviors on any given day. Almost half of our behaviors are unconscious and habitual. Simply accepting whatever habits we’ve formed is one option. Alternatively, we can try to deconstruct and potentially construct revised practices by understanding how they formed and how they serve us.
Habits have three parts: the cue, the behavior, and the reward.
Cues vary; they can be a time of day, a location, an emotional state, an event, or a person. I’m sure you have habits that get triggered by any one of these cues. Whether you are conscious of it or not, you have a routine (or pattern) when you first wake up. You probably have certain habits that you do Monday through Friday that differ from your weekend habits (day). When you go into work, you probably have a routine before you start working (location). Social media and eating crappy food could be bad habits you default into when you're in a particular emotional state, like boredom; and your cell phone buzzing (an event) likely gets you to pick it up and pay attention to it.
Despite numerous studies and significant advances in understanding behavioral science, a big caveat remains: every person and every habit is different. Understanding and addressing habits is a unique experience.
Here are some examples of ways that I’ve made and broken habits…
Use the cues
Father Time
Time-based cues are fairly common, but if you don’t stop to observe them, you might not even notice them in your life. You probably don’t have to tell yourself to wash your face and brush your teeth when you wake up in the morning. You’re probably just a zombie going through the motions until your brain reacts to the next cue. When you look at the clock at night and thought, “Oh, it’s time for me to get ready for bed,” then you’ve experienced a time-based cue.
When I wanted to make sure I had enough time in my week to work on my business instead of just in my business, I simply looked to my calendar. I found a date and time that I could focus on the business finances. On my calendar, I blocked off an hour every Wednesday morning. I made myself unavailable for meetings, calls, and anything that wasn’t my weekly finance time. During that time, I get caught up on the bookkeeping, send and follow up on invoices, and review whether I’m on track for my goals and pay my bills. It’s been over a year since I started this habit, and it’s forced me to focus on something that I knew was important but wasn’t prioritizing. I’ve been able to experiment with ways to increase my revenue because I built the habit of paying attention to my finances.
Attach and stack
Whether you’re aware of it or not, technology already grooms us to build habits based on events. If you have notifications turned on on your phone for any app, you’re probably in the habit of checking your phone a lot. Maybe too often?
Don’t worry, though; you can also use an event to trigger a good habit. Habit stacking is a way you can piggyback a new habit onto one that’s already formed.
For example, I successfully made meditation a habit because I attached it to brushing my teeth in the morning. After brushing my teeth, I would sit down quietly, close my eyes, and focus on my breath for 5 minutes. This habit was easy to build because I was already half-asleep in the morning anyway, so sitting with my eyes shut for five more minutes was welcomed. Not only did I stack the habit, but I also made it easy - I personally find it easy to commit to almost anything for 5 minutes. This brings me to my next tip...
Start of with a small commitment
Even when I have ambitious goals, I reduce them down to simple micro-commitments that make it hard to fail. Look at your proposed habit through a different lens; look at it through the perspective of a small, repeated commitment.
Here’s an example: Instead of trying to do three big things – like committing to using a complicated budgeting app, drastically cutting your expenses, and going from zero to fully funding your retirement accounts – first, do one small thing. Make a daily commitment to check your bank account. If you’re having trouble remembering to do it, try attaching it to something you already do, like looking at Instagram: before you begin an infinite zombie scroll, check your account. Eventually, you can change the habit to something more ambitious like updating your budgeting app.
Location, location, location
I wanted to work for myself because I hated going into a fugly office with terrible lighting every day. When I finished my work early, I was also frustrated that I still had to stay there and figure out ways to wind the clock down. I had the idea that working from home would be the best thing in the world - and it is - but it took me a while to get there. I struggled at first because I already had so many habits and routines formed in my home that were not conducive to being a productive worker.
It turns out there’s a bunch of research by David Neal and Wendy Wood from Duke University that suggests it’s easier to build new habits in new locations. At home, I struggled to be productive and create new habits because I already had cues, routines, and associations in place. I needed to overcome the cues my brain was responding to. Instead of trying to undo associations, I tried going to new places like coffee shops, co-working spaces, and hotel lobbies to get work done, and I was productive AF in these new places. Going somewhere new is a kind of tabula rasa, a chance to start fresh.
#Feels
Before I realized that technology was hijacking my brain, I would go on social media every time I felt overwhelmed with work or terrified to start a project. I was afraid of starting because starting meant that I could fail. If I never started, I could never fail. I used social media to distract myself from feelings of self-doubt and insecurity. Of course, that only made it worse.
Sometimes I catch myself feeling the urge to buy something when I feel like I’m not good enough. I trick myself into thinking that buying something will help me create a new identity or will suddenly make me good enough. New shoes will make me cool, and a new computer will make me a better writer.
Emotional cues might be the most challenging way to create a new positive habit, but it’s important to realize when your emotions trigger bad habits.
The power of people
The people we surround ourselves with influence our behaviors and habits, so I always want to be the dumbest, least skilled, or least ambitious person in the circles of people I roll with. I’m a moth to the light of more intelligent, more experienced, and more enterprising people than me; I can go to them for help, and they’re modeling habits I’d like to have.
The opposite is also true. Someone recently told me that all of his childhood friends are either in jail, have a record, or are dead. When I asked him why he didn’t have the same fate – without skipping a beat – he said, “I stopped hanging out with those guys.” Circumstances are powerful, but they don’t always have to be fate.
Keep showing up
Ready for the 15-million-dollar piece of advice? Keep showing up. It’s so simple, but for most people, it’s not easy.
I’ve somehow been playing in bands and making music for sixteen years, and I sucked for 13 of those years.
Music was the most fun when I first started. In the beginning, the strides you make when you’re learning something new are huge. The rewards feel massive, and it’s easy to keep showing up when progress is so apparent. It’s the middle - the plateaus - that are tough; it’s hard to show up when you feel like your progress is marginal or when it feels more like maintenance.
Throughout the years of my extreme musical hobby, I’ve watched so many people from the community stop doing the thing they once couldn’t imagine not doing. They stopped practicing; they stopped creating; they stopped releasing music; they stopped showing up.
Although I’m an entertaining musician to watch and my band is hardworking, we aren’t extraordinarily talented. Even with full-blown careers, marriages and adult obligations, even when we don’t have shows to play, even when nobody is anticipating our new releases, we just keep showing up. Incredible shit happens when you just keep showing up. Oftentimes people with average skills and talent can accomplish above-average results by simply showing up and putting in the work, bit by bit because results, like investment returns, compound over time.
Create a new identity
Who we are is constructed. From the clothes you choose to wear, the neighborhood you choose to live in, or the reason you chose to be a vegetarian - all of these things construct the identity you want to have and the identity you want other people to see. Your social media profiles are the crudest example of how you do this; you pick the photos, and you write the captions and the bio. You are choosing to present a particular identity, and you can change it.
So decide who you want to be. Tell yourself a narrative about who you are, and then take small steps every day to prove to yourself that you are the person you say you are.
For example, if you want to be the type of person who knows what’s going on with their money, a small step could be committing half of your lunch hour to read a book about finances. Watch who you become after reading several books.
If you want to be the type of person who is less distracted, a small step could be to turn off all your notifications on your phone.
If you want to be the type of person who is good at saving money, a small win could be to set up an automatic transfer into your savings account for $3/day.
When you focus on who you want to become, instead of what you want to achieve, you become the type of person who can achieve goals. It’s counterintuitive until you embrace that this duality is part of life. If you want to hold a bubble that’s floating in the air, reaching out and grabbing it doesn’t work - it will pop. You have to create the right conditions in your hands to be the type of surface where a bubble can land.
Revised and Updated April 7, 2021