New Year’s Resolution Dead? Establish the Habit First.
In his Letters, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca tells the story of a Greek teacher who was walking the streets of Athens with his students when he pointed with disapproval at a group of children playing dice. “Don’t worry, Master,” one of his students said. “They are only playing for marbles.” The teacher replied, “Do you think that learning the habit of gambling is a small thing?”
I have been studying, reading, and thinking about the acquisition of habits for many years. This is out of necessity: I am bad at learning good habits, and good at keeping bad ones. This deficit of natural talent has driven me to study the topic harder. When you are bad at something you want to be good at, you tend to take it apart and analyze it, over and over again. (This is probably why the best coaches are often people who were not successful at the sports they teach.)
The secret to improving personal habits is, as Seneca implied two millennia ago, to recognize the difference between learning a habit and achieving a goal. A goal is a target, a milestone you set your sights on. A habit is the recurring activity that can be, but doesn’t have to be, the means of achieving a goal. You can have a habit of playing the piano without having any specific goal. Or you can have the goal of playing the piano with a symphony orchestra, but not be in the habit of playing daily. Habits and goals can function together, but without the proper coordination, they may not.
Coordinating the two is the key, and there are two steps in this process. First, you acquire the habit. Second, you expand the habit to make progress towards your goal. But you are unlikely to manage the second until you have achieved the first.
So how does this work? Suppose your goal is to exercise at least 4 times a week. First, you must seek to make exercise a habit. Don’t worry about progress — just make exercise routine. That means every day, or at least many more days than not, you show up to exercise. This can mean putting on your running shoes and walking 5 minutes. It can mean sitting down on the weight bench and doing 5 presses with five pounds. It can even be as basic as just _standing_ on the treadmill for one minute without even turning it on. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that. In fact, the easier you make it on yourself, the better.
Why easy? Because the point isn’t to exercise. That’s the goal. The point is to establish a habit. And the easier the habit is, the less likely you are to skip it. Most people make the mistake when they want to do something new of going hard on the first day. This just wears you out and leaves you with less motivation on day two. Eventually your enthusiasm drains away and you stop doing it. Do you know someone who set a goal and achieved it, only to stop doing it after the goal is met? These are people who were motivated enough to achieve a goal, but didn’t ingrain the habit. Once the goal was achieved, the activity stopped, because there was no longer a goal to interest them. Think of the person going on vacation who diets and works out all spring for a summer beach vacation. Then the fall comes, and they put the weight back on and stop working out. Their motivation was the trip, but once that motivation is over, they are back to their old selves. The motivation to sustain the habit is gone.
Permanent change requires change in habit. Motivation will come and go, but habit, once established, won’t go away. Exercise, or whatever you are trying to do, has to be ingrained in your bones if you are never going to drop it. Habits arise from muscle memory. And muscle memory will serve you long after the initial excitement of trying something new runs out.
This is why you have to make the task easy at first. If you make the task as easy as possible, there is very little to stop you from doing it. As you do it over and over it becomes something you just do, like brushing your teeth or washing your hands. You do it because it is part of you, something you do every day, not for any reason except because.
Recently I decided I wanted to develop the habit of maintaining a daily to do list. Rather than buy an expensive planner or fancy app for my phone, I dug up old notebook I had and wrote one thing down. My immediate purpose was to write one thing in the book every day, no matter what. It didn’t matter what it was. It could even be a task I had already done.
The point wasn’t to achieve a full-blown organizing habit from the beginning. It was to establish the habit of picking up my notebook every day. After a week or two, once I was well into the habit of using the notebook on a daily basis, I switched over to expanding the list into something more useful. If at any time I relapsed and stopped making my daily list, I went back to the earlier plan of just writing something in the book, no matter how little, every day. I would again bide my time at that basic stage, waiting a few days, a week. And then I slowly expanded it again. The habit I wanted to establish was to open the notebook every day. Achievements came later, after the habit was ingrained.
This is true about any new habit you want to acquire. If you want to work out in the gym, start by just showing up. Wade in the pool, spend a minute on the treadmill. The initial goal isn’t to get in shape, to get in the habit of going to the gym. Once you start habitually going, the exercise part will take care of itself. You may look silly walking into the gym and then leaving in five minutes. That’s part of the friction of learning a new habit — you may look dumb doing it for awhile. But really, it’s the people who don’t understand what you are doing who are the dumb ones.
I have found over the years that the “just show up” technique is a very powerful way to gradually improve. If I want to ride the exercise bike, I don’t tell myself I am going to do it for 30 minutes or an hour, or that I will set a personal best. I just tell myself I am going to get on the bike. Once I am on the bike, my feet in the petals, I can decide what I will do. Most of the time, once I am in the starting block, I decide to do more than I originally planned. Five minutes becomes ten. Ten becomes fifteen. Because once you are there and doing something, it seems like a waste not to put some effort into it.
This is the point of creating the habit before worrying about goals. The habit puts you in the position of doing the task — it sets you at your desk with the computer on and the word processor open, it leaves you sitting on your bike and with your feet in the petals, it puts you with your daily planner in front of you and a pen in hand.
Get in the habit of showing up. Of putting yourself in the position to do what you want to do. When you have completely acclimated yourself to the practice of putting yourself in the right place at the right time (establishing the habit), the process of doing the job becomes much easier.
Concentrate on the habit first. After the habit is ingrained, the progress begins.
