How to Develop Good Habits In Life
Learn how to develop good habits in life and make habits stick. The power of habits are what make people successful. It’s what you do consistently every day.
Do you tell yourself you’ll go to the gym? Eat healthy? Or study more? But you never end up doing these things for more than a few weeks? The secret is to develop habits. OnePercent Better provides the only resource you’ll ever need to develop habits that stick.
Key Takeaways
Key 1: 66 Days
Understand that it takes about 66 days to develop a habit. Don’t give up until you’ve reached at least 66 days because each consecutive day your habit becomes a little more automatic.
Key 2: Build 1 Habit At A Time
With multitasking, you end up diversifying your focus and losing them all. As a rule of thumb, start building another habit after 30 days when the first habit is semi-automatic.
Key 3: The KISS Principle
Keep it simple stupid stop setting the bar so high that you can’t be maintaining the habit. Make is so easy that even your grandmother could do it. For each habit that you develop, find the sweet spot that works for you
“Isn’t it easier just to move forward one centimeter and let momentum help you out?” -Stephen Guise
Key 4: Establish Your Why
When you feel like giving up, return to why you started in the first place. Use it as fuel to keep you going. Also insure the habit is intrinsically rewarding.
“True self-discipline is not when you have someone ordering you to do push-ups, it’s when you decide on your own to do them.” -Stephen Guise
Key 5: Keep The Context Constant
There is a consensus that habits are acquired through incremental strengthening of the association between a situation (cue) and an action. i.e. the repetition of a behavior in a consistent context progressively increases the automaticity with which the behavior is performed when the situation is encountered.
Key 6: Be Held Accountable
1. Tracking keep track of your habits
2. Social Accountability “accountability breeds responsibility”
3. Stakes put something of value on the line that you can’t get back unless you complete the habit everyday for 30 days
Key 7: Never Skip Two Consecutive Days
When trying to build a daily habit, research shows that failing to execute the habit for one day is not a big deal, it drops the odds by about 5%. But if you fail to execute the habit two days in a row, you’ll reduce the odds of adopting the habit by 55%. Miss more than two days in a row and you’ll reduce your chances of building that habit by 90+%. Your primary goal when boarding a habit is to make sure it doesn’t miss more than 2 days of work in a row.
Key 8: Do It In the Morning
Every success book ever taps into Ego Depletion. The idea that our willpower is like a muscle and a limited resource. “The self’s capacity for active volition is limited and that a range of seemingly different, unrelated acts share a common resource.” Ego Depletion is why you should develop habits in the morning when your willpower is at its peak.
Key 9: Pain & Pleasure Principle
Every habit that you pursue is based on this principle. Consider the pleasure you’ll gain from consistent exercise compared to the pain of being sedentary. By ingraining this into your mind, you’ll gain more motivation to stick to your desired habit.
Key 10: Write It Down
The first step to increase the chances of a habit becoming productive member of your factory is to explicitly state when & where that habit will take action each day and write it down!