Category: Building Habits

I’ve been trying to get my buddy to play basketball with a group of friends and I for over a year now.

Every time it’s always the same thing: working or no response.

When I saw him today, I was joking that I was tapped out trying and I was gonna tag our other friend in to do the convincing.

He laughed and essentially said, “It’s not happening.”

When I asked him if he’s got anything else going on in his downtime, he essentially said, “…Besides work? …Chill. I work, I chill at home, I work again.”

Here’s the thing: this dude used to love playing basketball. He played for his school. We always used to play pickup at gatherings. He was damn good. And he’s like 15 years younger than me!

What I think happened is at some point along the way, he turned me down one too many times and it became an identity belief.

In other words, he behaved himself into a belief. And beliefs dictate future behavior.

It’s a catch-22 worth contemplating.

Want to lead your life with a different belief or set of beliefs? Start behaving as though the belief is already ingrained. With patience and perseverance… soon enough, it will be.

Want to behave differently? Start believing as though you’re already the kind of person who behaves that way. With patience and perseverance… soon enough, it will be so.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Which comes first, the belief or the behavior?

The answer: it doesn’t matter. So long as one of them comes first and begins the cycle of reproduction.

A good friend of mine told me once that his college professor said whatever he’s physically like when he’s 25 is essentially how he’ll be the rest of his life.

And what an awful mouthful of complacency crap to spew at room of knowledge-seeking students.

Does it become harder than when you’re 18? Sure. And maybe what the professor was trying to communicate is how “it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks”—in the sense that the habits we’ve built up until that point are the habits we’re going to mostly live by there forward.

But the real frustrating consequence of this statement is the seed that gets planted somewhere in the back of our minds that whispers, “It doesn’t matter.”

• “I’m gonna miss my workout!” …Well, it doesn’t really matter anyway.
• “I’m tired and just want to binge eat.” …Well, it doesn’t really matter anyway.
• “I’m stressed and feel like some beers.” …Well, it doesn’t really matter anyway.

But here’s the thing.

It matters.

• It matters that we show up for our workout—even if we’re late and it’s just for a few reps.
• It matters that we learn to build self-control habits for our appetite even when we’re tired.
• It matters that we find and prioritize healthy ways to managing stress.

Every decision is a vote. And inside us are two selves running for Bodily President. What that professor above said is some smear campaign to spread fake news and elicit a lower-self win. What we need to do is spread more of the opposite, rely on truth and fight for honest small victories that elicit that highest-self win… one key vote at a time.

The thing about massive positive changes in lifestyle is that they tend to have massive rippling side effects that often get overlooked and aren’t considered.

Let’s say, for example, you hit the gym and have a killer workout—after having been out of it for a while—and plan on keeping everything else in your life essentially the same.

The theory is that this will have a net-positive result and move you in the direction of stronger, healthier, and feeling better.

In reality, however, that intense workout ripples into:
– A proportionally killer appetite and eating way more than you usually do.
– Feeling exhausted from the spike in energy expenditure and unproductive and not present the rest of the day.
– Feeling painfully sore the next day and like you don’t want to move at all… making your reconsider hard workouts and resent the way they make you feel.

Incremental lifestyle change, however, allows you to maintain all other lifestyle variables while positively changing just the one.

…Like doing ten minutes of foam rolling in the morning or taking a walk around the block when you get home from work. These types of changes won’t have massive rippling effects into the other areas of your life and you’ll be able to maintain all that you’ve been doing PLUS add in this constructive action that moves your life in an overall net-positive direction.

A massive positive action that has an overall net-negative result isn’t a positive change at all. The goal—and what we should be focused on when considering lifestyle actions we could take—should always be how can I make this net-positive.

Remember that the ultimate test of a personal development system is what you do about it on your worst days—not your best ones.

Meaning don’t measure progress in how you performed when you were feeling well rested, motivated, and excited… measure progress on whether or not you showed up when you were exhausted, irritable, and over it.

Personal development is measured better in streaks and “x’s” on a calendar over pounds on a bar or lost on a scale. Get this right… and the rest will take care of itself.

Exercise isn’t something you ever complete.

Maybe after a session, sure, you can check it off your daily to-do list.

But, when tomorrow comes or maybe the day after that, guess what? …There it is again.

Understand this and maybe you’ll stop exercising in ways that make you hate exercise.

…Understand this and maybe you’ll stop doing all things that can’t be completed in ways that makes you miserable about doing them again the next day.

Little swaps that have made a huge long-term impact in my life (in no particular order):

• Swapped video games with building a website.
• Swapped pops/juices for flavored seltzer water.
• Swapped dairy milk with almond/coconut/flax milk.
• Swapped running around the block for playing basketball.
• Swapped double cream, double sugar coffee for black coffee.
• Swapped regular peanut butter for no sugar added peanut butter.
• Swapped buying coffee to-go with brewing coffee at home and work.
• Swapped news consumption with asking Claude carefully crafted questions about whatever I’m curious about.
• Swapped heavily processed, high-sugar protein drinks/bars for real ingredient, no sugar added protein drinks/bars.
• Swapped eating my dinner calories at night to eating them during my breakfast and lunch times (to intermittently fast).

…Not all at once, of course, but slowly and over the course of years. Once one is automatic, I try to add/adjust something else. Most recently, I’ve swapped Nutella/jelly for chocolate date spread. It’s much healthier and still has a pretty fantastic taste. Multiply these benefits over the course of years, decades, and even a lifetime and you can see the exponential power of this concept.

This is the way.

…A whole lot done over the course of a week? …Is next to nothing compared to the span of a lifetime. Even a month is a hardly noticeable speck.

The real change happens when things are done for years.

…And the best way to commit to something for that amount of time… is to make a change that’s small… aligned… yet mighty.