It’s easy to set goals and hard to achieve them.
There are too many reasonable, legitimate excuses to fall short. Plus, picking the right goal is hard, and if you learn along the way that it wasn’t right, all the easier to stop pursuing it altogether. I don’t like goals. They assume knowledge and discipline I don’t have.
Habits, on the other hand, are my best friend.
I’m listening to the song Porcelain by Moby as I type. It’s the first song in a playlist I created in 2012 when I first took up a daily blogging challenge. Each day, I’d sit down with a beverage, hit play on the playlist (never on shuffle, always the same order), and stare at the keyboard until I was able to start typing. Then keep typing until done.
I publicly committed to blog every day, so I had some accountability. And my friend TK was doing it at the same time and hounding me. It required willpower, but it mostly required structuring my day so it was a baked-in part. After about three or four months, I’d sit down, hit play, and begin typing without conscious thought. It was like driving home from work for the hundredth time, where you suddenly realize you’ve made it back to your driveway but you don’t remember how because it was automatic.
I’ve continued daily blogging streaks for most of the time since then, only stopping when I wanted to mix it up for some deliberate reason. I always end up coming back to daily blogging because nothing else does the same thing for me. (That’s another story for another day.)
The first note of the song Porcelain has a Pavlovian effect on me. I can immediately write with very little difficulty, and I get the delight of discovering what it is I had to say when done. This is not magic, or some special skill I was born with. It’s true, I am more naturally inclined to communicating ideas than many personality types. But the ability to write a post in a few minutes with no notice, aided by a playlist, is the result of a habit. I’m present and mechanically making the thing happen, but not putting in much work, just like when driving that familiar route on autopilot, because I’ve created a habit.
This habit has been more valuable to me than almost any act of will I’ve pulled off. Daily blogging has resulted in publishing several books, launching companies, raising funding, finding customers and employees, travel and speaking gigs, and more personal transformation than I could ever document – even on a daily blog.
If I set out to accomplish even just one of these outcomes as a big audacious goal, I’m quite sure I’d have failed or quit or gotten lost along the way. “Write a book” is a momentous goal that I probably lack the willpower or clarity of process to accomplish. It certainly was ten years ago. But “blog every day” is a habit I can form with only a few changes in conditions and incentives around me. It requires no major ability to see the future or plot a path to any concrete outcome. It just accretes good attributes bit by bit. And what do you know, after a few hundred posts, there’s material enough to collect into a book. And so much more.
I began typing today like everyday, as an instinctive reaction to my well-worn surroundings and sounds pumping into my ears. And I kept typing until everything above came out. Now I feel like I have accomplished at least one thing that improves me in some way, whatever else I fail or succeed at today.
That’s a great feeling and the result of a simple habit.