“Good habits are worth being
fanatical about.”_John Irving
Today, I
want to share a strategy on how we can make good habits easier to install and
bad habits a little difficult to indulge.
This simple
strategy involves the use of friction as a means to an end. By its use, we eliminate existing friction to
give good behaviours a clear smooth passage but we create additional friction
to hinder the growth of weakening bad habits.
On the importance
of habits and the reason for diligence about the subject, an American
psychologist, Williams James once wrote as follows:
“We must make automatic and habitual,
as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can and guard against the
growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should
guard against the plague.
The more of the details of our daily
life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our
higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.”
So if we
want to make good habits easy, all we need to start with is: reduce the
friction on the path of purpose by removing anything that can get in the way of
our best intentions.
By the same
token, if we want to stop doing something less desirable, all we need to start
with is: increase the friction on the path of purpose by enabling our
resistance to self-destructive behaviours.
All mortals
need dependable supports in their moments of weakness. That is why a carefully
designed environment is necessary, even for the strongest amongst us.
In this
direction, James Clear, the author of 'Atomic Habits' writes:
“The people who
exhibit the most self-control are not actually those who have superhuman
willpower; they’re the people who are tempted the least.”
For such
people, if they don’t want to watch much television, they don’t rely on raw willpower to prevent the formation of a low-value habit; instead they proactively unplug
the TV and keep its cabinet locked.
The silent
but essential insight here is this: as imperative as doing the right thing
now is, doing the right thing, the next time is far more important.
This is
because habit is basically defined as repeated performance. What we do once or
once in a while doesn’t count for much in the context of habits. Habits are
about what we do every single time.
Repetition
is the essence of habits, and for many people, frictions determine the fate of not
just the present action but that of the next series of actions.
When we set up
our environment for a meaningful purpose, we are priming it to make desirable
behaviours the default behaviours. In other words, by removing obstructive frictions,
we are making good actions, the easy actions to do.
For example:
If we want to make reading a habit, instead
of putting TV set in multiple rooms in our house, we should put stacks of books
in multiple rooms in our house.
This kind of
setup gives regular study a clear smooth passage.
It is so
because—too often—what we are surrounded by, can make a difference in the kind
of behaviour we actually engage in, as the Stanford professor BJ Fogg writes:
“If you pick the right (small) behaviour and
sequence it right, then you won’t have to motivate yourself to have it grow. It
will just happen naturally, like a good seed planted in a good spot.”
Now, whatever
it is that we may want to achieve, we just need to proactively design an environment
where the undesirable actions become the ones that are difficult to take on,
while the necessary actions are proactively made easy to do.
Understand
that when we harness the discipline to design an environment that enables a
specific, meaningful aim, then our preferred habits will happen almost
effortlessly.
Therefore,
set up your environment to make good actions easy, going forward.
