A little over 3 months ago, I started to take cold showers in the morning. This is now part of my routine, although the weather got significantly colder here.
A little over 4 months ago, I started to learn to play the guitar. I practice now 3 times a day, for about 60 to 90 minutes in total.
About 10 years ago, I started to do yoga. For the last 3-4 years I did this consistently, pretty much every morning (I don’t think I skipped more than 3-4 days in a year).
11 years ago, I started a challenge in which I wanted to write an iPhone app in 30 days. These days I pay rent by being a mobile app developer – and while I’m doing this for other people I still continue to do it for my side hustles (like ZenTasktic).
About 15 years ago, I started journaling. I did this every single day, for the last 5 years (and with very little interruptions before that).
All these activities have in common 3 things. They are all part of a bigger goal (being healthier, more creative, more balanced), they all started as challenges and, in the end, they all became habits – meaning the amount of energy I spend to keep them in my life is close to zero, all going on auto-pilot.
The Road From Goal Setting To Habits
I wanted to start this paragraph by writing that I’m a big fan of habits, but then I realized almost everything in our life is some form of a habit, so that would have been weird.
Instead, I’m going to start by sharing with you my process of going from goal setting to habits. It’s this process that allowed me to achieve all those things I mentioned in the beginning. It’s a process I trust and apply every time, knowing it will always work as expected. It’s battle-tested, effective and refined. Are you ready?
Here we go.
It’s by doing 30 days challenges.
That’s it. Sorry to disappoint, if you expected something more complex. It’s really that simple. No $879 course containing an amazing 24 steps method, going on sale for only $99, only today. You have to go somewhere else for that, sorry.
Of course, there are some variations. Most of the time the challenges have indeed 30 days, but sometimes they have more than that, 60 or 90 days, or more. I even had an entire year encompassing a challenge, split in 12 parts, one sub-challenge for each month. Also, some challenges may not end with a habit, and that’s ok.
But the bottom line is that, before engaging in something significantly difficult, or time consuming, or life-altering, I do a challenge first. It’s really like a trial period, a test in which I give myself both time and space to experiment and assess.
Although we’re all humans, and we’re all in the pursuit of happiness, we are also very different. We have different upbringings, different preferences, we live in different contexts and also, at any given age, we want to have different experiences. Because of that, what may seem like a nice thing to do for some person, may be irrelevant for me. And still, it may feel like something that I want to do, I may feel a pull towards that thing.
A few times I engaged in things that seemed “cool” or “life changing” without proper assessing. Those activities were, indeed, cool and, for some people, they certainly were life changing, but they were simply not good for me, at that moment in my life. So my attempts to integrate them resulted in quite a lot of lost time, and a relevant amount of frustration.
Instead of blindly pursuing some new activity – with the aim of making it part of my life, more or less on auto-pilot – I do this 30 days trial. The key part is the limited time. At the end of the 30 days period, I’m not tied to that thing, if I don’t want to anymore.
But, in most cases, if I want to keep doing that, the same 30 days amount is enough to create some actionable mass, some gravitational pull towards a new habit. Meaning that at the end of the challenge I’m in a much better position to actually implement the habit, if I want to.
And, in case you didn’t know that yet, this very post is part of a 365 writing days challenge.
