“The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.”
Kevin Kelly, Blog
Beyond the Quote (215/365)
When you get a look at a day in the life of a high performing individual it can leave you feeling dumbfounded. I’m sure you’ve found yourself wondering, like me, how on earth they do so much in one day? What’s their secret? Is it something in their nature? Is it a learned skill? Is it 10 coffees?And while, for some, it might involve 10 coffees, the underlying secret that helps all high performing individuals perform to the best of their ability is their habits.
I’m sure this doesn’t come as a surprise that building good habits is fundamentally important. But, have you ever thought about why building good habits can help you become a high performer? As Kelly points out above, habits are so powerful because they streamline the decision making process and make your ability to complete important tasks more efficient. Habits take out the whole process of self-negotiation and get you into a mode of doing more while simultaneously using less. Habits conserve mental energy and willpower which, naturally, allows you to work longer and continue to make better decisions for longer throughout the day.
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This is one of the key distinctions to understand between a person who is living the lifestyle and a person who is trying to copy the lifestyle. The person who is living the lifestyle has the habits in place and has already streamlined the decision making process for most of what they do throughout the day. The person trying to copy the lifestyle doesn’t. They have to motivate themselves, negotiate with their inner voice, expend what willpower they have saved up, and force themselves to get things done. The person living the life has taken the time required to carefully craft each important lifestyle habit into their life, one at a time, over an extended period of time, until they’ve accumulated them all to become the complete lifestyle that we see as a whole.
This is why if you’ve ever tried to radically shift your lifestyle to match that of a high-performing individual, while you may be able to do everything they do to the tee, what won’t be the same is the amount of energy it takes to get through each of the tasks. The person living the lifestyle has their pace established—they’re at their marathon pace and are cruising forward at maximum efficiency. The person copying will have to sprint to try and keep up.
And while this may last for a little while, ultimately, the person will exhaust themself and revert back to a walking (or even crawling) pace. This is the rebound that so many of us experience when we try and do too much with change in our lives. And it’s all because of how much more energy is required for us to complete each individual task. Once we learn how to reduce the energy, we too, will be able to do more.
So, rather than try and copy someone’s entire lifestyle, a better approach might be to copy just one of their lifestyle habits that appeals to us and get that established into our lifestyle first. Once that habit is established and it becomes something that we don’t have to think about doing anymore (it’s something that becomes naturally a part of our day), then we might consider adding another habit. And by-and-by we will slowly (but surely) be on our way to optimizing our lifestyles, too.
All of us humans are exhaustible—don’t get it twisted in thinking that some of us are inexhaustible. And we all have the same 24 hours in each day. That said, the game then becomes about efficiency of energy and willpower. And habits, my friends, are one of the fundamental secrets to maximizing your efficiency in being able to complete tasks with less mental energy and willpower. Master this game and you’ll master your lifestyle. The question to confront now is, what to work on next?
Read Next: 10 Sobering James Clear Quotes on Making Progress from Atomic Habits
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Written by Matt Hogan
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