“Why quit cigarettes or all those sweets you’ve been eating? Isn’t life short and meant to be enjoyed? Don’t you deserve a treat? Yes, these are the justifications I gave myself too. And they’re a load of bull. Life is short, so why waste it on pure junk? Those things don’t make you happy—if anything, they made me less and less happy about myself. I’ve been happier once I gave up those habits and learned to be healthy and trustworthy to myself. Eating healthy food is a treat. Living smoke-free is pure bliss. But the biggest reason to change is that you love yourself. You don’t need to harm yourself to find happiness and contentment. Taking care of yourself is a form of self-compassion, and the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll feel good about how you’re loving yourself.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 148)
“If you plunge into really cold water, you’ll be shocked, and you’ll hate it. But if you go into water that’s only a little colder than room temperature, it won’t seem too bad. After awhile, it’ll feel pretty normal. Then if the water’s temperature drops a little more, it won’t seem too bad, and soon that will become normal. You adjust. When it comes to changing your life, don’t plunge into the freezing water. You’ll soon get out of the water and be afraid of going in again. Instead, take a dip in slightly cool water. Make a very small change. Adapt to that, then make another. Gradually, through a series of small changes, you’ll see amazing progress.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 126)
“All my attempts to control things should be abandoned, and I should just accept the ever changing, ever flowing nature of my life as a river. It turns out that this model can bring me peace no matter where I am, no matter what’s happening. If plans get disrupted, my day gets interrupted by a sudden crisis, information starts coming at me from everywhere, the pace of events starts quickening… I just picture myself as a river, with all of this stuff flowing through me. I don’t try to hold it, control it, freeze it, but I embrace the flow. I smile, I breathe, and I focus on one thing. Then the next. Not holding tightly to any of them, or wanting the river to be any certain way.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 120)
“When we procrastinate, it’s because we have an urge to run from the difficult, uncomfortable task. We don’t want to do the hard work, or be in confusion, or fail at something, so we get the urge to run. It stems from the fear of failure, of not being good enough. The urge comes up, and we follow it! But we don’t need to follow it. We can watch the urge to procrastinate, like a cloud, but not act on it. We can just let it float by, and get to work. Let the cloud float away, because it doesn’t control you. The cloud isn’t you. It’s just a passing phenomenon, one that arises and floats away.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 87)
“Resistance can be overcome by doing the smallest possible step. For meditation, I just had to get my butt on the cushion. For writing, I just had to open up a document and write a few words. For cooking healthy food, I just had to get out a knife and an onion. For studying a language, I just had to press ‘play’ on the audio lesson. For yoga, I just had to get into child’s pose. For blogging, I just had to open up the form for writing a new post. For flossing, I just had to floss one tooth. For reading, I just had to open up the book and read a sentence. I think you get the point. Find the minimum viable habit. The smallest increment of doing the activity. The least objectionable version. And the resistance is overcome.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 80)
“Never let your mood determine whether you should do something or not. Mood is a bad indicator of the worthiness of any activity.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 80)
“You don’t control the results of growing a plant—it will grow however it grows, because we don’t have god-like powers that can control how a plant will grow. You don’t control the outcome, but you do control the inputs. You can water it, give it more sunlight, feed it some nutrients, give it good soil, make sure bugs aren’t eating it. You control the inputs and environment, but not the outcome. So Grow a Plant when you’re making changes: you don’t control the outcome, so you can’t get fixated on it. Don’t attach too tightly to the results of a change. Instead, focus on creating a good environment. Focus mostly on the inputs: what are you bringing to the change? What is your intention? What is your effort? What is your enjoyment and mindfulness? If you do this with weight loss, then you don’t focus on the weight loss itself. You focus on the input: what kind of food are you eating? Are you eating mindfully? Do you have a compassionate intention when it comes to your eating? Are you exercising mindfully? Are you giving yourself a good environment to support these changes? If you focus on the inputs, you don’t know what the plant of your weight loss change will result in. Maybe it will mean a slimmer version of you, maybe a healthier one, maybe a stronger one with more muscle. You don’t know exactly, because you can’t sculpt your body like clay. What you can do is water it, give it sunlight and good nutrients, and see how it grows.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 57)
“Success is never due to one thing, but failure can be. Sleeping well won’t make you successful, but not sleeping enough will hold you back. Hard work is rarely enough without good strategy, but even the best strategy is useless without hard work. Many things are necessary, but not sufficient for success.” ~ James Clear, Blog
“What’s the typical feedback loop for someone who doesn’t exercise much? When she does the exercise, she gets discomfort, sweatiness, tiredness, maybe even soreness. That’s negative feedback for doing the exercise. Not doing the exercise is much more comfortable, because she’s on the Internet doing easy, mildly pleasurable tasks. That’s positive feedback for not doing the exercise. The combination of these two feedback loops is why—at first—it’s so hard to form the exercise habit. People are up against much more than they realize, because no amount of willpower can overcome a setup of feedback loops that go against the behavior they’re trying to create. And it works like that for every single habit: eating junk food and shopping and playing games are easy habits to create and hard to break, while exercise and mediation and eating vegetables and learning languages are much harder. All because of the feedback loops. So what are we to do? Reverse the feedback loops to get the behavior we want. We want positive feedback for the habit we’re creating: rewards, praise, physical pleasure, spending time with a friend, getting stars on a chart, continuing a streak, a feeling of accomplishment, enjoying the activity with a smile. We want negative feedback for not doing the habit: embarrassment of people knowing you didn’t do it, losing a bet, enduring some embarrassing consequence, losing the streak you’ve created, experiencing some kind of difficulty or loss. Grease the slope. Create public accountability. Set up rewards and consequences. The smarter you’ve set up your feedback loops, the better you’ll be at doing the habit.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 42)
“Imagine yourself as a kid who wakes up after a night of heavy snowfall. There’s a thick layer of snow on the ground, clean and without a path. The first time you walk through this snow, you have a very wide array of choices for what path to take. You can walk to the left, down the middle, to the right, zig zag, walk over that hill, and so on. Not only do you have many choices of paths to take, but each one will be very difficult, because there’s a foot of snow everywhere. Now picture walking to school the next day …the snow from the previous day is still there, but now there’s a bit of a path you created from yesterday’s walk. You can still create a new path, but the one you created yesterday will be a bit easier. So you take that one. Each day, you decide to take the path already created. This is a groove in the snow that gets easier over time, until you’re probably not going to take any other path. Creating a new habit is a lot like that: you’re creating a groove in the snow. At first, you can go anywhere, and it’s difficult going …but once you’ve created a groove, it’s much easier, and you don’t have to forget new paths anymore.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 28)
“You are only as mentally tough as your life demands you to be. An easy life fashions a mind that can only handle ease. A challenging life builds a mind that can handle challenge. Like a muscle that atrophies without use, mental strength fades unless it is tested. When life doesn’t challenge you, challenge yourself.” ~ James Clear, Blog
“You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply—though all the while that very day… may be your last.” ~ Seneca, via Essential Zen Habits (Page 22)
“Remember the truth about the mind when it comes to change: it’s a little child. Imagine that your brain is a child that wants pleasure and wants to get what it wants, and it really wants to get out of discomfort. This Childish Mind will do everything it can to get out of discomfort. It will make you run from exercise, from doing difficult tasks, from new and confusing things. The Childish Mind will make excuses, rationalizations, beg to quit. It’s very, very good at what it does, and it’s constantly working against our best intentions. I learned how to overcome this Childish Mind Syndrome: I made my running habit ridiculously easy. I told myself all I had to do was go out and run for a few minutes. My Childish Mind couldn’t object to that, because it was so easy! And when you make your habit change easy, I’ve learned, the Childish Mind actually doesn’t work against you in the beginning.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 18)
“Imagine that your life and your attention are a small room, and in this room you wanted to put a meditation cushion, a weight set for exercise, a kitchen for healthy eating, a couch for reading, a writing desk for creating a novel, a yoga mat for doing some yoga, and a tea table for mindfully drinking tea. The tiny room would be cramped, and none of these things would have any space, and we’d not really be able to do any of them. This is what happens when we try to do multiple habits at once: we overfill the small space of our lives and our attention so that we have no room for anything. Instead, imagine that we only had one thing in that room—let’s say the writing desk. That’s all that’s in the room for the moment. This desk would have space, and the writing would get our full attention. Create space for your habit change, by doing one habit at a time, and you’ll do your best job on that habit.” ~ Leo Babauta, Essential Zen Habits (Page 16)
“It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent, when they are not.”
Thich Nhat Hanh | Read Matt’s Blog on this Quote ➜
“…nothing delights the mind so much as fond and loyal friendship. What a blessing it is to have hearts that are ready and willing to receive all your secrets in safety, with whom you are less afraid to share knowledge of something than keep it to yourself, whose conversation soothes your distress, whose advice helps you make up your mind, whose cheerfulness dissolves your sorrow, whose very appearance cheers you up!” ~ Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
“Reading is like a software update for your brain. Whenever you learn a new concept or idea, the “software” improves. You download new features and fix old bugs. In this way, reading a good book can give you a new way to view your life experiences. Your past is fixed, but your interpretation of it can change depending on the software you use to analyze it.” ~ James Clear, Blog
“You cannot fix me because I am not broken. And even though everything has changed, I am still more me than I’ve ever been.” ~ Iain Thomas, Every Word You Cannot Say (Page 225)