Every day doing the same things
Whenever you set up on the journey of improvement in any aspect of your life, you will be going through ups and downs of everything.
Sometimes the habit that you do will feel like the best thing that you could off ever done in your life.
Sometimes it will feel like the drag.
I am still exploring why there is such a huge difference in how you can feel from one day to another about the same habits, but the fact stays.
It is much easier to relax, then go to the gym every day, even if it’s a habit.
If you wake up every day at 6:00, it feels natural to you, and you feel that doing it any other way would be just wrong. But one day you go to sleep later than usual, and your hand starts itching to put the alarm at 7:00.
Live for the motion, not the result
The way to keep on doing the same thing every day is to have a reward for the habit that you have done. You need to make the everyday habit much more appealing to you. So much that you fall in love with it.
If you are in the habit of going to the gym every day, pots a picture in the social network, every single day. That could potentially grow your followers in that niche and give you side income.
If you are in the habit of writing every day, then post the pieces that you finish online to share them with the world.
If you are in the habit of working on the side project, then build in public and explain why you did stuff. Most of the time, you will get the evangelist and believers for the project that way.
The list can keep on going.
How to choose the habits correctly
One of the main problems that I see is that people don’t think too hard about their habits, while in reality, it is one of the most important things.
You don’t need to overthink whenever a habit is good or bad. What you need to do is as following:
- Picture yourself after 365 days, or on the same day but a year in advance.
- Ask yourself, if you did the habit every day for that long, would your life or you as a person be better?
- If the habit is also challenging to start, write down what would you get, out of doing it. Think hard and list everything that you can.
- Now think back to the habit, can you adjust the way you do it or what you do so that the impact in a year is higher?
- Now make a decision, is spending a little amount of time per day worth the grand result that it will bring in to your life?
My habits
That is the process I go through for every single of my habits.
The new 2 habits that I added just a couple of days ago is to do exploring and reading of research papers in the fields that I am interested in.
This allows me to stay on top of new discoveries as well as find the best possible inspiration and body for my writing. Most of the time, whenever reading about psychology, I could get an idea about programming and so forth.
The second habit is meditation. I have heard about meditation from everyone around me. It is in every single podcast that I listen to. It comes up on any topic that I could possibly imagine. I have always tried starting with meditation, but it was always too much time and no real impact feeling.
This time I decided to approach it another way. As I am not sure whenever the benefits of meditation are real(as I haven’t felt anything and usually quit because of it) I decided to make the habit as minimal as possible and treat it as topic change technique instead of meditation.
I placed it right between me finishing to write my daily morning journal and writing articles, such as this one! This allows me to fully change the way my brain worked for the journal and write a better and more structured piece here.
I think that both of the habits will make me a better person in 365 days, there is no doubt that not doing them is an option, but once you start you wouldn’t want to go back. It feels too good to think of the opportunities you are missing out.
Habits are easy. Sometimes my idea of understanding the habit only gets in the way. So start the habit and then after a week do this exercise for it.
Start now. Get perfect later.
Klim Y
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