Lately, I realized that the secret to success in anything is building proper habits. I’ve read two books that changed my mind on this - “Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg and “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman.
I learned that on average we act, think and make decisions almost half of the time on sub-conscious autopilot - habitually. The reason is that mental, emotional and physical effort burns energy (glucose) and our bodies and brains are designed to save it because for most of the human pre-history and history, it was a scarce resource and it made sense evolutionary. MRI scans of people who do something habitually (or are naturally very talented) show that there’s no much activity happening. It means that our mind can do pretty smart and complicated things in System 1 - intuitively, without effort, almost automatically - if we train it good enough.
One can build and alter habits by focusing on habit loops: cues-routines-rewards. Each habit consists of these three elements - cue telling our brain to activate the “habit procedure”, routine activity that is being executed and the reward that reinforces a habit.
And this brought me to this post - the list of habits I want to build. Some of them I already managed to implement: e.g. I started saving +50% of my income and invest in ETFs, I quit sugar and moved more towards low-carb diet and I started reading at least an hour a day. These are huge changes, that made a positive impact on my life.
There’re few other that I’d like to improve (I also got some inspiration from the Rich Habits blog):
- Physical exercise: I have no ambition to be a Navy Seal but doing half an hour to an hour of an intensive exercise every day would be perfect. (I’ve created a thread about this.)
- Deliberate Practice/Education: I always wanted to be a lifelong learner. I sort of have two purposes in this area: I want to have broad general knowledge about the world and I want to be highly specialized in “my” field. General knowledge is something I’m working on by reading more books. The specialization is something I have to rethink - I used to focus on my IT skills since I had an objective of a professional career. Now, when I realized that at some point I’ll be FI and I found so many other passions, I have to think what - if anything - should be my object of specialization.
- Networking: I need to invest more in meeting regularly with people - professionally (for business) and personally (for happiness).
- Relaxation/Leisure: I want to rest better. I thought about learning meditation, but I’m not sure how to start.
- Dreams/Goals setting: I need to clear my head and think about what I want to achieve in my life. It’s not an easy task because I have so many (often contradictory) ideas and I’m not sure which of them will make me happier and which are worth the time and effort - and I’m in the process of giving up some plans (career in IT) and acquiring new ones (focus on being a good parent/husband). I already have few ideas: one is learning more languages - German, Swiss German and French are on my list. Second, I’m thinking about a Personal Finance startup - helping people getting to FI in a smooth way for a very tiny fee.
- Effective Altruism: I’d like to help people in smart, resource-efficient way.
- Order/Minimalism: I suck at keeping order at my house and I hoard too much useless stuff.
- Technical Skills: Except for a computer system, I can’t fix anything. I need to learn how to build, fix and improve things myself.
There are also a few habits that I’d like to destroy or minimize:
- Social media addiction
- Smartphone addiction
- Internet addiction
I know from my management studies that goals have to be SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. I need to tackle this problem first and turn my habit-formation ideas into more specific SMART goals. I also have to think harder about cues and rewards to turn a routine activities into real habits that reinforce themselves every time I do them. The biggest challenge, however, is to figure out what is my purpose - what should I dedicate my life to. Before I’ll hit FI, I need to re-learn how to structure my life and adapt to these ideas.