Why are Habits the Key to Success?
We all have habits, good ones and bad ones. The life we live, to put it simply, is nothing more than collection of actions and choices. What actions we take and the choices we make are linked to our habits. We have been learning about habits and the dynamic role they play in our lives. When we finally got unconformable enough with our life, we knew we needed to make some big adjustments, create new goals, and change our families trajectory…but how?
We needed to Break Bad Habits
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”- James Clear, Atomic Habits.
This quote is brutal. We had good initiations. We could say the right things, but time and time again our habits would kill our good imitations every single time! We tried to motivate ourselves; that was useless. Our habits will kill motivation…maybe not on the first day or the first week, but in the end, our habits will win. When we tried to “break” our bad habits, that also fell flat. We couldn’t figure out why. Then we discovered that you can’t “brake” bad habit, but you can choke it out and starve it of time and resources by creating new habits.
Our Brain Glue will go to our Habits
The thoughts in our brains need “glue” to stick around, yet there is only so much of that “glue” available. So when we have a good thought, a happy thought - something up-lifting, It use up some of the glue. If you keep thinking about that, the glue that holds the negative thoughts in place, gets weaker as it’s getting moved to hold onto the new thoughts. As more thoughts come in our minds, they get attracted to the stronger glue. So, if there is more negative thoughts, your mind will keep attracting negativity, but if there are more positives thoughts, your mind will find more positivity -This is called a positive feed back loop. All that to say, if we can do the hard work to make new habits, we can rewire our brains to be more positive, and productive.
We needed new Habits
We needed a different way to look at ourselves and our lives, so we starting looking at what very successful people did. One thing we found is they read books. Not just fiction, but books that expand their knowledge and their understanding.
We started a challenge of reading 10 pages of a book a day. The books had to be ones that would help us grow, whether that was in marriage, business, parenting, or lifestyle. This year alone, we have read, The Power of One More by Ed Mylet, How to Think like a Monk by Jay Shetty, Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, The Call of the Wild and Free by Ainsley Arment, and the one we are currently reading is Atomic Habits by James Clear.
You are probably thinking, “Okay, good for you…What’s your point?”. We wanted to change our lives and get more knowledge and we choose to read books to help accomplish that goal. We could have made the goal to read 12 books a year together, but instead, we committed to reading 10 pages a day no matter what. As James Clear says in his book, Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” It is the habits that effect our lives, far more than any other factors in our life. We created a new habit, one that would keep information and growth flowing into our minds and or life and it’s pretty crazy to realize how many books we’ve worked through just by committing to a daily habit.
Just knowing we can make a new habit and seeing the results from that, breathes a whole new life of possibilities. You have the power to change you. This is fantastic and also terrifying. No one can into habit. When its hard and when you don’t feel like it, force youself to do it “just one more time” as Ed Mylet says. It has the power to transform you life. Who knows, you may look back ten years from now and see just how amazing it really is to have solid habits in place in your life.