The Power of Small Habits.
Holiday Blog Series — #2
Introduction.
I know it’s my vacation time, but writing blog posts has become such a habit over the past three months that I just don’t want to stop.
So, I thought I’d reflect a bit on how small habits can pretty quickly change your life for the better.
A Short Anecdote to Kick Us Off:
I started blogging earlier this year.
It’s interesting how hard it was in the beginning. My first blog post took me some 7 hours for a 5-minute read. And, the 7 hours didn’t include the procrastination time or the time spent feeling like quitting every 15 minutes. But, I pulled through.
And, then, I did it another time the next day, and then the next day, and then the next, and all of a sudden, I had 45 blog posts under my belt. I couldn’t believe it.
And, it got easier. It got easier so quickly. By now, most of my posts take me something between 1 and 2 hours, including creating the thumbnail and promoting the posts.
And, of course, nobody cared about my blog posts in the beginning. They had 3 reads. Most likely all from me with different IP addresses due to my VPN. But at some point someone commented on one of my posts:
“Teddy, thank you. Your posts are truly valuable. I’ve been reading them for a while now!”
And, god, this made me so happy. One little comment. And then other things started happening. People started following me, readership grew to 20, then 60 daily readers, the comments increased, and people indicated really loving my posts.
But, how is this related to habits? Well, the only thing I did was to write for an hour or two a day. Nothing else. I created a habit of writing every day. And, it had amazing benefits for myself and for building the brand around the company my co-founders and I are starting.
So, let’s explore the benefits small habits can have for anything you want to achieve.
Benefit #1: Habits Are Gateways to Achieving the Things You Want
To achieve things you want to achieve, you usually need to commit. You need to make some kind of continuous effort. This is what I usually don’t like about motivational videos on YouTube.
They promise to help you understand something that will change your life. But, you can understand as many things as you want. As long as you don’t do things, you won’t get anywhere. Just swallow the pill. The sooner the better.
But, the great thing is that there are concepts that you can use to get things done. And one of those concepts is creating habits.
A habit is something that doesn’t require a lot of effort and usually happens automatically.
Now imagine the power you’d have if you could train yourself to do hard things or impactful things automatically without a lot of effort.
Habits break down barriers to start. Once you created the habit to, e.g. blog, you feel like you wanna do, you feel like you need to do. And you start all of a sudden.
But, for me, I don’t think I necessarily created the habit of blogging. I created the habit of starting to write every day. No matter what. And when I start writing, it automatically leads to a blog post. Let’s explore this further in the next point.
Benefit #2: Small Habits Are Easy to Implement.
Most people dream too big. To stay with the example from above, most people think, “I want to be a successful blogger,” and when they start blogging, they’re bloggers but for some significant amount of time, they don’t seem to get any of the success. So, they feel like they failed.
However, their immediate goal shouldn’t be to be successful bloggers. Their goal should maybe not even be bloggers. Their goal should be to write a publishable text on some schedule that fits them well.
Never set yourself goals that you can’t achieve. Never try to set up habits that you’ll immediately feel like you will fail.
It needs to be tangible, trackable, and achievable.
Ask yourself what you want and try to break it down into something that is so clear and so easy to both do and check if you did it or not.
- Do you wanna pick up writing? — Well, commit to writing a paragraph a day.
- Do you wanna reach out to leads? — Well, commit to reaching out to one lead a day.
- Do you wanna start running? Well, change into running clothes every day.
The idea here is two-fold:
- It’ll be so easy to follow those habits that you will have many small success experiences rather than a few big failures. It’ll keep you motivated.
- It’ll be easy to keep on doing things. Once you wrote a paragraph, you overcame writer’s block. Once you reached out to the first lead, you already started working, why not a few more? Once, you wear running clothes, you could actually also go for a walk.
Benefit #3: Habits Can Turn Hard Things Into Fun Things.
This usually doesn’t occur in the very early stages, but it happens sooner than you’d expect. If you think about why you don’t like doing things, it’s oftentimes because you don’t know how, because it seems hard, because you feel intimidated or even frozen by the task.
Once you create habits, you will — as simple and stupid as it sounds — just do things. And, once you start doing things, you will learn and grow. And, with this growth, you’ll realize that you might not be too bad at it. And, once you realize that, you’ll most likely start enjoying the task that was once so daunting.
I feel stupid admitting it. But, at one point in life, I hadn’t really read a book in over a year and half, but once I created the habit of just reading for 60 minutes 6 days a week at 6 pm, I trained myself that I would just start reading and doing it. I set a timer, and the first few days were hard. I needed to keep myself focused. But, after just a week or two, time started flying and I wanted to cheat in the other direction and continue reading after the timer went off.
And, it went even further. Rather than binging YouTube videos, by now I wanna read. I never thought I’d become this person. But, I am.
It’s so interesting and it feels so stupid but when you commit to a new habit, you’ll change very very very very very quickly.
Benefit #4: One Small Good Habit Is Often Enough to Start a Cadence of More Good Habits.
I’ve heard people say so often that we’re in a “mental health,” “purpose,” or “procrastination crisis.” People waste a lot of time (on average 6 hours a day). And, as long, as you keep on wasting all of it, you won’t change. By the way, this just means that you’re stuck in a procrastination or “wasting time” habit.
But, interestingly, you don’t need to eliminate all the hours you waste a day. You just need to commit to one thing that you’d consider useful.
This one good habit that you can commit to will usually be enough to light a motivational flame within you.
When you, e.g., run for 30 min twice a week, you’ll be in a runner’s high. And, you’ll be able to use this high to spark the next great thing: getting started on the work project you’d been pushing off for weeks.
Rather than being stuck in a loop of one bad decision leading to another, you’re gonna be in a loop where one good decision inspires the next one.
Conclusion.
So, I can only encourage you to
- Think about what you really want in life,
- Break it down into the steps that would help you get there,
- Define a very small habit that is tangible, trackable, and achievable,
- Commit to doing it no matter what, and
- Do It.
It’ll change your life, I promise.
About the Author.
Teddy Lange is a co-founder at Resonaid and is responsible for business development and customer experience. Before joining Resonaid, he’s been a Sales Rep and Junior Sales Manager, and co-founded various companies. He has just finished his graduate degree in Public Policy with a focus on communication at Harvard University. Feel free to reach out to him at teddy@resonaid.co.
