Thoughts on Healthy Habit Formation

I’ll start by saying that I’m going to borrow some from James Clear and his #1 New York Times Bestseller Atomic Habits and BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits in this article. My goal is to share and summarize some thoughts around forming healthy habits, but if you want to dive deeper on this very important topic, both of these books are excellent.

So I thought this topic was timely. Today is the 2nd to last day of January, so we’re nearly 1 month into 2023. Many of you probably wrote down some New Year’s Resolutions. There’s a good chance you got out of the gates strong, but may be starting to lose momentum on some of them. The classic example is how packed the gyms are in January with people looking to get in shape. Fast forward to March and that same gym feels empty as a large number of people have regressed into unhealthy habits.

There are a variety of reasons, but one of them is most of us drastically overestimate our willpower. Even the strongest willed among us can only get so far on that alone. Breaking that down further would be an article of its own, but just think of the last time you set out to change something, and never got any traction. Same thing goes for breaking a bad habit. I’ve been meaning to try and experiment with intermittent fasting and only eating between 10AM and 6PM each day. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten…thinking about it. Because my willpower alone isn’t enough.

That’s where habits come in. Goals are great, but it’s recurring habits that compound and lead to big results in the medium and long-term. I have mine broken into daily, weekly, and monthly buckets. And for anything I define as a goal, I ask myself what the habits are that I need to develop to lead to achieving that goal. What follows are the major steps I think of when building healthy habits.

1) Identity

I think it’s generally a mistake to roll right into habits without doing a little bit of soul searching on who you want to be at a broader level. I’ve written before about Articulating Your Personal Purpose. This is a key part of how I’ve defined my personal identity, but choose whatever feels right for you.

The key though is that if you’ve already defined how you see yourself, habits that align with that will have less friction. James Clear has suggested some statements along the lines of “I’m the type of person who xyz’s.” It could be “I’m the type of person who exercises.” “I’m the type of person who puts others before themselves.” “I’m the type of person who people want to work with.” He also says that once you have your identity, then executing on those habits that align is essentially casting votes for who you want to be and how you see yourself, which is reinforcing.

I think of identity as allowing yourself to swim downstream with your habits instead of fighting harder to swim upstream.

2) Start Small

If you’re having trouble starting a new habit, try scoping it smaller. Perhaps you want to start meditating for 20 minutes every day but can’t seem to get started. You might literally start with just sitting for 1 minute in silence each morning. Or you can’t find the time to exercise for an hour…how about doing 10 pushups, 10 squats, and a 5 minute jog?

The idea is that getting started is half of the battle. It’s a different muscle you flex to start a new habit than it is to scale it, so why not break that up into two parts. Start with “Tiny Habits” as BJ Fogg writes about, then once you’ve built the discipline to do that, start expanding it.

3) Make it Obvious

James Clear has a 4-step framework in Atomic Habits which is summarized below. It all starts with the cue and making it obvious. The example I like to think of is let’s say you want to workout in the morning on your way to the office. Obviously you’d probably set your alarm, but that might not be enough as you might hit the snooze button.

To make it really obvious though, perhaps you lay your workout clothes out the night before and pack a bag with your work clothes and everything you’ll need to shower and get ready at the gym. By doing that when your willpower is presumably higher the night before, you’ve removed friction the following morning. In fact there’s probably friction if you DON’T workout in the morning since everything is already prepared like you’re going to. Also note that breaking bad habits is essentially the opposite of building good ones in the graphic below.

And if caffeine is of utmost importance in the morning like it is for my wife, if you have a fancy coffee maker perhaps you can even program it to run right when your alarm goes off to remove even a bit more friction ;-)

4) Tracking

My mom and dad recently bought fitness watches. In addition to the sleep tracking and other features, one of the first things they started utilizing was the step tracking. My mom in particular has started to raise the bar every few weeks on how many steps she takes per day and had recently worked her way up to nearly 10,000 a day.

If you think about building that new healthy habit, I think a key is the ability to track and quantify something. In the case of step tracking, it’s super easy too because there’s nothing manual about it, your device can just track it for you and display a number, graphs for trending, etc.

I’m a little more old school with many of my habits. I have an excel file with a variety of daily & weekly habits listed and I track my compliance in that file. The way I’m wired I get satisfaction from checking things off a list, or marking them as complete so I’m playing into that tendency with the excel habit tracker. Chris Munn on Twitter recently shared his template (Link) for habit tracking. This is far fancier than mine but might be something you find helpful.

5) Don’t Be Too Hard on Yourself

I’m a naturally competitive person, so if I set out to build a new habit, I’m going to hold myself to a high standard. That said this saying applies - “don’t let perfect become the enemy of good.” This goes hand in hand with starting small. But too often I see someone momentarily fall of the wagon, but momentarily becomes permanent.

It doesn’t have to be that way, but that requires cutting yourself a little slack. I like Sahil Bloom’s 2 day rule. This basically says if you’re trying to build a daily habit, don’t allow yourself to miss more than one day in a row.

I could go into more detail, but if I limited myself to 5 steps in building healthy habits, that would be it. 1) Identity 2) Start Small 3) Make It Obvious 4) Tracking and 5) Don’t Be Too Hard on Yourself. If you haven’t been intentional about thinking through goals and identifying habits that can help achieve those, I’d encourage you to do it. Everybody is at a different phase in life, but at some level I think this about leading an intentional & examined life which hopefully everyone aspires to. If you’ve done this but are having a hard time making these habits stick, consider these 5 steps and more importantly, dig into one or both of the books I recommended, I don’t think you’ll regret it. Happy habit building!

Here are some of the favorite things I’ve come across the last 2 weeks:

• Article - Permanent Equity Annual Letter - I admire the heck out of Brent Beshore and the team at Permanent Equity. This letter should give a glimpse into why. There’s a level of humility, clarity, and purpose in what they are building that is something to strive for across many avenues of business and life

• Book - The Geometry of Wealth by Brian Portnoy - I originally read this book a few years ago when it came out but it was on my list to re-read recently. There are countless finance books that jump straight into saving and investment tactics/approaches. This is one of the few books that zooms out to more philosophical questions and considerations around finances while also providing some good tools and frameworks. Definitely recommend

• Article - Three Things by Chenmark - Chenmark is a group similar to Permanent Equity in terms of philosophy. Good short article with 3 concepts - 1) Dare to be Great 2) The Power of Yet and 3) The Slight Edge - that are worth considering in business and life

• Podcast Episode - James Clear on The Tim Ferriss Show - If you aren’t bored by all this talk of goals and habits yet, then check out this podcast interview. It’s long, but even if you just listen to an hour of it, I promise you’ll get something out of it. I walked away really impressed by just how clear of a communicator James Clear is (pun not intended)

• Quote - To bear trials with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden. - Seneca