Skip to main content

How can you develop good habits? (An Introduction)

So, you planned this big bang goal on your special day – maybe your birthday, or anniversary or New Year’s Eve – “I am going to start exercising daily in the new year and will be losing 5 kilos of my weight by end of the week”. And we all know what happened. After the first couple of days of extreme workouts it fizzled out and there were other more urgent and important things that made you busy.

A lot of us plan many ambitious things and make grand resolutions. Most of us even make a start to them with a bang. But then after the initial blast, the excitement and motivation wanes. Gradually it takes the back seat and we never really get to accomplish the things that we set out for creating this new habit in our resolutions. 

As a continuation of blogging about things I get to learn from different sources, this one is inspired by the learnings from the book called Atomic Habits by James Clear, which I started reading recently. I will just be sharing my understanding from this book as I progress reading through it, chapter by chapter. 

Create habits so small that you don’t really have to put an effort into starting them.

The concept of the book relies on encouraging people to start small when it comes to habits. And it repeatedly emphasizes this multiple times throughout the different chapters using different examples.

How small you ask? Well, it’s Atomic Habits, so yeah, quite small. So small that you don’t really have to put an effort into starting it. 

It introduces new concepts gradually that support your journey towards building good habits. It not just helps in building good habits, but also gives tips and methods for getting rid of the bad ones. Mostly it does this by using the inversion of the same principle that it uses for building the good habits. 

Over time, ultimately your life is directly related to the habits that you have.

It explains the concept of compounding and creates parallels on how this applies for habits. It encourages the reader to start with small changes to build new habits. These changes might seem very small and unimportant to begin with, but if you keep repeating them daily or regularly, then over the years they would compound into something huge and produce mighty results. Over time, ultimately your life is directly related to the habits that you have. The better the quality of your habits, the quality of your life would be equally better. 

It gives a short introduction to the authors journey and explains how these principles helped him towards creating good habits and making him successful. He refers to another book called “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg and how this is, in some ways, an expansion of some of the concepts that were introduced in that book. 

You can get yourself to act in certain ways, if you attach the right reward or punishment to it.

It accentuates the reward and punishment theory, where if you can attach an attractive award with an action or a painful punishment to it (not necessarily on the physical level), then you can get yourself to act in certain ways and change your life. 

Over the next few blogs, I will continue to write about what my take on this book is, as I read through it, bit by bit. 


Please feel free to comment or provide feedback about my blog below and whether the articles are useful and how they can be improved.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please feel free to add any questions, comments or feedback about this post.

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding anger, it's ill-effects and how to successfully manage it - Part 2

So, continuing from the previous post regarding how anger is one of the most basic emotions and learning to handle it successfully is one of the most important life skills. ( Click here to read part 1 ) But before we learn about the different ways, we can handle the feelings of anger, it is important to understand why we need to do it in the first place. So here are some of the harms and ill-effects that have been studied and proven for people who have issues of anger management.  One of the main things, that you might be able to relate with easily as well, is that, more often than not, we tend to regret losing our temper and getting angry, as soon as we have calmed down a bit. And it mostly does not matter who was at fault and how stupid an action he or she had taken to enrage you. So, even though the anger stayed with you for probably a few seconds or a few minutes – or maybe in some cases for up to a couple of hours – the regret that we feel stays with us for almost the w...
Post a Comment
Read more

10 Tips to handle the Ups and Downs in life

If you look at any business, even for the most successful ones, their profits do not always keep going up and up; they must go through some consolidation phases and bear some losses as well at times. So, it is similar in life - no one in life just has it all good, there are phases where they must face the music and go through a rough patch.  So, what is the solution to this? Well, if you could just eliminate the lows completely, would that not be just wonderful (maybe boring, but stable). But unfortunately, that is not really some strategy that one can apply, as you do not have control over all the parameters and circumstances in your life. There might be some control over the way you make your choices in life, so making better choices and anticipating adversities is certainly one way of minimising the pain and duration of the downs in life, even if you can’t eliminate them completely.  When everything’s going good, not many of us really question things or have much difficu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nothing can stop a person who has already found their definite goal in life

As the saying goes, "Where there is a will, there is a way", once the person has decided what they want to achieve and set that as their life's ultimate burning desire to be achieved at any cost, there is no power in the universe that can stop them from achieving it. Now in one of my previous posts I mentioned there is a marked difference between wishes, desires and goals. A wish or desire is something that a person thinks is nice to have, maybe by looking at others and what they have, maybe due to the feelings of jealousy towards someone who has already got it, or maybe due to a temporary boost of motivation or some arbitrary resolution, like on a new year's day. But that in itself does not transform into a goal for them.  Many motivational speakers say that to turn this wish into a goal, one needs to start with a plan and perform daily actions towards achieving it, only then it becomes a defined goal. As long as you haven't yet taken any efforts towards start...
Post a Comment
Read more