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Developing and maintaining healthy habits is critical to your success, both today and in the future. Once you set the right goals in motion—whether to teach yourself the fundamentals of AI, improve your physical and mental health, or become more financially savvy—the corresponding habits will help you inch closer to that goal.
I've had mixed experiences with habit-building in the past. I've struggled to stick to some healthy habits, but at the same time, obsessively maintained other habits to a point where they ended up causing me undue stress and prevented me from "going with the flow." This behavior kept me from spending more time with friends, family and enabled me to skip experiences that I later regretted. I ended up becoming obsessive about things, and whenever I doubled down on any particular goal, it would come at the cost of everything that would have to make way for it.
Once I got married, I realized that something had to give. The number of responsibilities in my life had increased significantly, and I concluded that this number was only going to increase during my adult years. I couldn't afford to obsess over only one particular area of my life while deprioritizing everything else. I had to find a way to develop healthy habits to push forward all the different facets of my life in which I wanted to progress, and ultimately succeed.
Through trial and error, I've been able to pick up a few key insights that have allowed me to successfully build habits that serve my future self well. Below, I identify barriers that prevented habits from sticking for me in the past and the solutions I used to address them.
Barriers to Sticky Goals
🙅 Choosing the Wrong Goals
Sometimes, you'll realize later on down the road that a particular goal isn't worth the effort. It causes you more undue stress and pain to justify its rewards. Maybe your dream of becoming a chess grandmaster seemed inspiring at the moment after you binge-watched The Queen's Gambit, but later on, you realized that the level of effort and commitment it would require for you to get there wasn't realistic.
🤨 Doubting Your Ability to Succeed
Doubt is a major killer of good habits. Doubting that you're dedicating your time to something worthwhile can be a powerful deterrent for committing to a particular habit. You may doubt that you picked the right goal—and maybe, you're right. But if you're wrong, it can be costly. The opportunity cost is all the unrealized gain you could have earned if you fully committed to that particular goal.
🌵 Too Much Friction
Here's a situation for you. Let's say you committed to eating healthier, which means reducing the number of times you eat out at restaurants. But on the other hand, your social life is important to you and your friends like to hang out in restaurants. You're eating your regular dinner of blanched chicken and broccoli when you get a text message from a friend telling you to come to join them for dinner at a local restaurant. You refuse, saying you're busy, but this continues to happen every day. You find that your friends, a few weeks (and dozens of text messages) later, don't bother inviting you to hangouts anymore. Now, you're left with estranged friendships and a plate full of blanched chicken.
Whenever you feel like you have to choose between your goals and another part of your lifestyle that you enjoy, you're experiencing friction. And friction eats away at your willpower reserves.
I experienced this for most of my college years and beyond. If the pressures of your daily life make it too difficult to adopt healthy habits, you will need to make some changes. Otherwise, you'll find yourself depleted of willpower.
😮💨 Depleting Willpower
If you experience enough friction in your daily routine, you may find yourself becoming exhausted. Although it may seem like pure laziness at first, this exhaustion is the side effect of depletion of your willpower reserves. Depleted willpower is dangerous, not only because it tires you out but because it may well lead you to break your habit in a moment of weakness.
😐 Losing Passion
We've all had this happen to us. We get overwhelmingly excited at the end result that we find a rush of energy to implement a new routine in our lives.
After seeing the Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron, I'll admit that I was so excited that I decided to hit the gym for 90 minutes a day, five days a week until I sculpted a body fitting for the sequel. I thought to myself: It's possible—he did it! So why can't I?
Then, after a few weeks (erm…days) of carrying out this routine, I was so burnt out that I stopped working out for several weeks. The habit was now more like a chore (and a painful one, albeit). I looked back at myself from a few days prior in disdain. How dare I make such a stupid decision out of haste? How did I not realize how difficult this would be to maintain just a few days later?
Overcoming Barriers
🙅 Choosing the RIGHT Goals
You've probably heard about the SMART framework for choosing goals before.
There are a plethora of resources available for setting effective goals. Still, I will elaborate on what I think is the ambiguous piece of the SMART puzzle: realistic.
To choose realistic goals, you will have to imagine a hypothetical scenario where you're working towards accomplishing a particular goal. In that specific scenario, you may find yourself leaving out critical components, and this is natural. We as humans often struggle to imagine hypothetical scenarios holistically. I may imagine that I want to be Cristiano Ronaldo, but I don't immediately think of the downsides of being the most famous man on the planet.
“If you’re not willing to do a whole sale, 24/7, 100% swap with who that person is, then there’s no point…” - Naval Ravikant
I may imagine that I want to be a chess grandmaster, but I conveniently leave out the thousands of hours of training and countless sacrifices it takes to get there. We can't pick and choose the best aspects of the desired outcome and leave out the bad ones.
One great way to get an idea of what's realistic for you is to research the sacrifices and level of effort it took for others to achieve a particular goal. Don't just look at the glory and the perks of accomplishing the goal. Find folks that have achieved these things and ask them questions about what it actually takes. Surround yourself with others looking to achieve similar goals and reduce your learning curve by picking up tips and secrets to speed up your journey. Building this support network is also a great way to retain motivation as you continue on your journey.
When you're in doubt about whether a goal is worth it, consider dabbling for a bit. Sample the habits that particular goal requires and see if the effort is worth it for you. Worst case, this exercise will make you better at gauging what is and isn't realistic for you to pursue.
🤨 BELIEVING Your Ability to Succeed
Sometimes, when you set reasonable SMART goals, you find yourself doubting your ability to succeed. If you set yourself a goal of scoring in at least the 90th percentile of the GRE, you may at some point start doubting your ability to succeed. Your goal is technically a SMART goal, but that doesn't stop the doubts from creeping in. What if I work this hard and only score in the 80th percentile?
My suggestions to prevent doubt from sabotaging your chances of achieving your goals are to:
Identify the evergreen benefits of pursuing that particular goal, and
Consider setting checkpoint goals instead of pass/fail goals
An evergreen benefit reminds you of the benefits of a particular habit, even in the case of failing to accomplish a specific goal. For example, suppose you established the practice of writing one blog post per week, with the goal in mind of finding virility on the internet. In that case, you could help eliminate doubt by thinking through some of the intrinsic (evergreen) benefits of the habit: including the ability to communicate more effectively, creating an outlet for your creative thoughts online, etc.
In the case of the GRE, an evergreen benefit you could identify is that you would be much more prepared for college by prepping for the exam. You could comfort yourself by reminding yourself that even if you don't score in the 80th percentile on the exam, you will be much more prepared for college than if you hadn't set a goal of doing well. If that wasn't enough, you could remind yourself that you could always retake the exam, and all the prep you are doing will only benefit you in subsequent attempts. These reminders serve as release valves for the pressure that pass/fail goals like this carry with them.
The other suggestion is to set intermediary checkpoint goals for a given pass/fail goal. Putting yourself in a do-or-die situation may create undue stress for you, and setting intermediary goals—like 'score above x on a practice exam' will reduce that stress.
🌵 REDUCING Friction
It would be best if you found ways of reducing friction between a new habit and your lifestyle wherever possible.
“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.” - Bruce Lee
The best advice I received regarding this was from a fitness trainer, who understood my desire to eat healthier and improve my physique and my desire to have a healthy social life. He summarized his advice, which he shared for over an hour, with a Bruce Lee quote: "Become like water."
You don't want to be the person that severs healthy friendships because you're eating healthier. Or the friend that doesn't drink who avoids hanging out in social settings where their friends are drinking.
I'm not saying to go out to restaurants every night if you're trying to eat healthier. I'm suggesting you use your stores of willpower strategically. We have a limited supply of willpower each day, and we don't necessarily want to be stingy with spending it, as this may imprison you. Spend your willpower reserves to buy balance in your life.
In the case of going to dinner with friends, you may find that going to dinner once per week with your friends is enough to maintain your friendships. And you found ways of reducing the willpower it takes for you to go to these restaurants without breaking your dietary goals. These might include one or more of the following:
Planing your meal ahead of time by reviewing the menu for the healthiest option
Eating lighter throughout the day in preparation for that meal
Exercising a bit extra that particular day to give yourself a calorie allowance
Use some creativity to reduce the willpower it takes to find that balance in your life, and spend from your willpower reserves strategically. "Become like water."
Side note: There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Suppose you made a commitment not to drink, and your friends are continually pressuring you to do so. In that case, I'd strongly suggest you reconsider those friendships. In this scenario, your “friends” are essentially squeezing more willpower out of you than you can afford to spare.
If you're suffering from an addiction, like alcohol, please avoid exposing yourself to your triggers at all. Having an addiction means you have extremely little willpower to spend on whatever it is you're addicted to. Addiction is nothing to be ashamed of, but being aware of your limited willpower can help you avoid putting yourself in environments that may ask you to spend more willpower than you can afford.
😮💨 MAINTAINING Willpower / 😐 KEEPING Your Passion
The solutions I have for these two barriers are similar, so I'll group them.
The secret to not being exhausted by your routine is reducing the amount of willpower you need to exert to do them. In addition to finding creative techniques like the restaurant example mentioned above, you can reduce the willpower you exert by sticking to a new habit long enough to see it become a core part of your daily routine. Think about walking down a new route for the first time. It feels further the first time since you're much more aware of the small things. Then, over time, it becomes almost automatic, and your body can execute the task without dedicating all of its bandwidth to that task. A developing habit behaves similarly to this.
Unfortunately, sometimes you can't help but run out of willpower. This isn't a great place to be in, but rest assured: you have tools at your disposal to reignite the flame of your desires to implement positive habits. Here are some pieces of cautionary advice and tools to help you in the case of depleted willpower:
Avoid starting too many new habits at once - Habits are like flywheels. Starting a new habit will require more willpower than maintaining an already-developed one. If you start too many new habits at once, you'll rapidly deplete your willpower reserves.
Recall why you started - Finding ways to remind yourself why you started in the first place helps keep you motivated. You can't necessarily capture the excitement of embarking on a new goal in a bottle. Still, you can find ways of documenting it for your reference later on (in the form of notes, video recordings to yourself, etc.)
Use fear (sparingly) - Fear is arguably the most potent motivator. If you're struggling to find ways of inducing fear to motivate yourself, you can manufacture it by using a tool like Stikk, which forces you to pay money when you break a habit or goal. Too much fear towards something can trigger an unhealthy amount of anxiety and resentment, so be sure to use this sparingly.
Implement cornerstone habits - Cornerstone habits are those habits that lead to other good habits. For example, I make it a point to always exercise in the morning, even if it means 10 minutes of stretching. I've noticed over time that I find it much more challenging to eat healthy during the days I don't exercise at all. Once I get some exercise during the morning, I find it much easier to eat healthy foods than if I hadn't done so. Exercise is a cornerstone habit in my routine that makes it easier for me to carry out other habits that are important to me.
If you can spend your willpower just enough on a regular basis without fully depleting it, you’ll find that it improves over time. It’s also a good idea to use those vacation days and step away from social media to “recharge” your willpower every now and then (a lesson I learned the hard way on multiple occasions).
Avoid overspending your willpower reserves at all costs.
Although I can't confidently say that I'm world-class at building new habits just yet, the advice I shared above has helped me tremendously to building and maintaining healthy habits over the past few years. I hope that you find them just as helpful in achieving your goals.
Good luck, and if you have any questions, tweet me at @haroonchoudery.
See you next week.
Haroon