Introduction

My fortieth birthday was a tough one for me.  Behind me was half my life.  I found myself carrying a lot of heavy baggage.  Worse still was what I had left behind me: a trail of missed opportunities and dead dreams.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of who I’ve become.  But who among us is immune to existential crises and regrets?  Not me, and probably not you either.

For me, turning 40 was a landmark event–bigger than any birthday I’d had prior. My perspective tipped–seemingly overnight–from “the future holds such promise” to “I’ve already decided what my life is and what it’s likely to be.” 

Amidst this existential crisis I held the limp corpses of my abandoned dreams and demanded answers about how this came to be.  How did I allow this to happen?

Baseball

When my dad introduced me to baseball at the age of four, I couldn’t get enough.  I’d watch every televised game the Oakland A’s played, which fortunately was almost daily.  My dad taught me how to play catch.  I’d replay highlights in my head from the games my dad and I had watched together (from memory as this was long before Youtube).

I would imagine myself as Mark McGwire or Jose Canseco taking big swings, making contact and watching the ball sail over the fence for a home run.  I’d pretend my bed was the outfield wall, and re-enact the catches I saw outfielders make, leaping over the wall to snatch a home run away from the opposing batter.  I’d throw tennis balls against the outside wall of our home creating ground balls for me to field.  I especially loved throwing them at an angle where I’d have to chase–even dive for them to prevent them from going into an imagined outfield for a base hit.

While I wouldn’t call my infatuation with baseball a habit, per se, my love for baseball was a daily preoccupation.  My skills and feel for the game grew commensurately with my obsession and repeated engagement.  I knew with certainty that I was going to be a professional baseball player when I grew up.

You’ve probably guessed that that dream never materialized.  As I got older, I watched fewer games, fantasized less about the plays I’d make in the field, and realized I’d never be the hulking giant that Mark McGwire or Jose Canseco were.

But there was no single moment that my dream died.  It got harder to practice real baseball skills without a large field and fellow ballplayers to practice with.  My fantasy became a less compelling way of staying connected to the sport than real ball.  And thus, my daily engagement faded.  I never figured out a way to turn my passion into habit.  

My dream didn’t explode in a fiery car crash.  My dream died a slow death of starvation, over many years.  

My existential sorrow exists because I never lost the love of playing baseball.  I feel regret because I failed to integrate it into my daily life.  What if I had turned baseball into a daily practice, meditation, or ritual?  No matter how small, what if I had just kept it alive in my mind and body?

But I didn’t.  That’s how my dream died.  I have no doubt that you’ve had some dreams perish in a similar manner.  Small moments of neglect, repeated day after day, withering slowly at first then drastically as days became months, then years.

You Are What You Do Every Day 

The point I’m building up to is probably quite obvious now: I’m not a baseball player because I didn’t figure out how to engage with baseball every day (Note: “every day” is of course an exaggeration.  Everyone gets sick, goes on vacation, has an off day, and/or simply breaks from routine at one time or another.  By every day, I mean something like: “every typical day”).  

It’s the same reason I’m not an astronaut, musician, mathematician, or monk.  I never nurtured the constituent skills, knowledge, and practices of these other identities through deliberate, daily practice.

Now I had a desire to be a baseball player, but no particular interest in acquiring these other identities.  In that way, baseball player and these other identities are different.  What makes them the same is daily regular neglect.

Let’s examine this from the reverse perspective.  Do you have any negative identities?  Are you overweight? Out of shape? Underachieving?  Lost?  Poor? 

By the law of habit, you are habitually engaging in practices that bestow whichever of these unwanted identities you own.

The Popularity of Habit Content

Why have so many books been written–and more importantly, why have so many books on habit sold–in the last 5 years? Even more videos, listicles, and video summaries (this included) accompany the rise in published works on habit.

What sparked this trend? 

It’s an interesting question worthy of its own discussion.  A rise in ADHD culture where adult issues related to initiating and maintaining chosen behaviors abound?  Or, perhaps the absence of structure once provided by 9-5 office jobs in the pre-covid era stripped us of much-needed self-governance muscle?

My pet theory:  We are in the middle of a cultural epidemic of identity crisis.  

As society increases in complexity and the economic gulf widens between the haves and have-nots, younger generations struggle to define themselves.  Adolescents and young adults have traditionally found identity through traditional career paths.  Work, when done right, provides opportunities for growth, skill development, and purpose.

For most young people, identifying, cultivating, and establishing a mature identity in today’s world will likely be the most difficult challenge they undertake.  In fact, many don’t succeed, which results in a wasteland of failed launches, immature parents, financially underperforming “adults” in their 30’s and 40’s who never found their way in their 20’s.

Habit provides the antidote to this crisis.  What you do every day declares to yourself and the world exactly who and what you are.  Negotiating your role in the workforce, in relationships, and in your community becomes much easier once you stand tall on a foundation of robust, established, curated habits.

Whatever the reason for their proliferation, books on habit have clearly captured the imagination of the masses.  

Habits Are the Building Blocks of a Consciously-Constructed You

As a trained psychotherapist, I encourage skepticism of any method that promises radical transformation.  People naturally build personalities that are robust, resilient, and conservative against change.  This means that the things you don’t like about yourself are every bit as resistant to change as the aspects of you that serve you.

Psychotherapy is a process of confronting the more stubborn, weed-like structures of the personality that don’t serve you.  It’s a process of working with rooted resistance and clearing obstacles to growth.  The unconscious mind, the wiser, more powerful, more circumspect aspect of mental life does the bulk of the work in terms of replacing old structures that are out of date and working poorly.

But, what about change we actively want? How do we consciously choose new skills and facets of identity?  This, I believe, is where habit comes in.

The art and skill of creating new habits the way we deliberately, steadily, and consciously choose who we are in the process of becoming.

Let’s consider how habit can triumph over unconscious resistance and the mind’s bias towards conserving the old you.

The Magic of Habits

Habits can be small

To embrace habits is to embrace the master value of consistency.  Small steps that turn into large distances with the passage of time and unyielding consistency.

To be explicit, the size of any habit is not nearly as important as the commitment to repeating it.  If your goal is to be physically fit, the habit could begin with one push-up per day, walk one block, walk up one flight of stairs, or simply go to the gym for five minutes (this could mean literally going to the gym–that is,not doing a single exercise).  

Remember that fitness, like many other aspects of self-care and self-governance are daily practices that will be relevant for the rest of your life.  It’s amazing how much people tend to overestimate the importance of intensity when it comes to exercise among other habits, and underestimate consistency.

The best way to build consistency is to start small–tiny even.  The catch is simply that you must do it every day, rain or shine.  Intensity is not the virtue to seek when it comes to change.  Consistency is.

Habits create a process orientation

Outcomes matter in life.  There’s no getting around it.  The trick of the mind you must learn to accept is that the best results come from making the process the outcome.  

What does this mean?  You’re much better off setting the goal of writing 200 crappy words per day than the goal of writing a New York Times best-seller.  

Quantity begets quality, perfect is the enemy of the good, the journey is the destination, and a little is infinitely more than zero.  

These truisms all point to the same conclusion:  Just do it.  Or as Seth Godin urges, merely do it.

When you focus on building a habit, you orient yourself to a much healthier game.  How do I complete this essential task every day without breaking the chain?  How many days of completed habits can I stack?

With this process mindset you cultivate agency, discipline, and professionalism.  With a results orientation, you fritter away energy worrying about perception, simulating others’ responses, and worrying about challenges yet to arrive. 

Focusing on what others will think, how critics will receive something, what results you’ll get, or how much revenue a product will generate are crippling mindsets.

You see, in life there is no finish line, except death.  Life goes on after successes and failures alike.  Having a process orientation means building something that works for you.  That is invaluable no matter what outcomes you generate.  Success? Great, start again.  Failure? Disappointing, but the process goes on.

And even though the outcome is not the point (since it’s not under your control), your outcomes will almost certainly be better by focusing on building productive habits you can maintain over time.

Habits are Ballasts

At the core of every adult human is a fickle child.  Our moods change, our impulses move from one object to another, and the shine of instant gratification perpetually allures.

If our conscious minds are like vessels, then the seas of the Id–the raw emotional force that seeks immediate expression–exerts pitches and tosses us about.

Everyone has moments, days, weeks, months and even years where our vessels capsize, leaving our will scrambling to stay afloat and climb back into the safety of its vessel.

Habits are like ballasts.  Habits steady the ship and protect our conscious will from being overtaken by stormy seas.

The stronger and wiser our habits, the more stable and secure we feel.  While we can never have perfect control, we feel at our strongest when we stability triumphs over unpredictability day-in, day-out.

Habits are efficient

Imagine a task, practice, or project you’ve struggled to tackle in recent months or years.  Consider for a moment how many plans you’ve hatched in your mind to complete it.  Have there been false starts?  Bursts of effort punctuated by frustration plus extended periods of neglect?  How much willpower went into those surges of effort?  When you’re not making progress, is there anxiety? Stress? Inhibition? Overwhelm?

The internal experiences I mention are major drags on energy, productivity, and self esteem.  Back-of-mind ruminations on neglected responsibilities kill our moods and dull the blades of our attention and drive.  

Habits, when successfully implemented, offer an effective solution.  Intuitively, making slow, gradual progress may not seem like the most “efficient” solution.  After all, isn’t efficiency about getting more done in less time?

But the efficiency of habit comes from minimizing angst, worry, overwhelm, inertia, and dread.  Do one small thing per day without stress or inhibition, and suddenly you’re making progress without guilt or stress. 

Habits are energy efficient.  Habits are the electric vehicles of self-governance.  Habits get you from point A to point B slowly, but with negligible energy expense. 

We all admire the manic Ferraris and Lamborghinis of personal productivity.  0 to 60 in 3 seconds, going fast, making others look like chumps, and looking sexy in the process.

These high-performance, high-speed people are as rare as they are admirable.  They seem to get more done in a day than you do in a month (or more).  Habits mean agreeing not to compare yourself to the F1 racers of productivity.  

When you embrace habits, you compare yourself to the stuck, depressed, self-loathing version of yourself that can’t seem to make progress on a daunting task.  Habits are efficient because they get you out of your chair and moving towards an important objective.

Habits affirm the self and build Identity

The self is a notion we have of who we are.  An identity is what we convince the world we are.  The self is an evolving entity.  It changes, it develops, and grows.  It contains features of our personality, strengths, weaknesses, interests, tastes, and aspirations.  

In contrast, identity is what we earn in the world.  It’s one thing to have a self-image of being funny, generous, and intelligent.  But do others see you this way?  Do others describe you as funny?  Do they expect you to say smart things and give more than you receive?  These are questions of identity.  

As social creatures, we are constantly creating a story of how we want to experience ourselves and how we want to be seen by others.  Sometimes our actions align with how we think of ourselves and how others see us.  Other times, our actions don’t align with what we think about ourselves or how others see us.  

This creates tension, suffering, and anxiety.

Habits, when thoughtfully chosen and enacted consistently, are vehicles to create harmony between how we see ourselves, our actions, and how others perceive us.  Our minds like it when our idea of ourselves as being smart matches our behaviors of reading every day and having engaging conversations with others.  Habits make this alignment possible.

Habits build self-esteem

Habits are integral to all aspects of self.  I just mentioned how habits affirm self-image.  But let’s consider another aspect of self: Self-Esteem.

Self-esteem is a tricky concept to which to assign meaning.  I’ll define it the following way for now.  I reserve the right to change it later.

It’s something like this:

Self-esteem = self-efficacy + productivity/creativity + positive self-concept.

Now let’s define the constituent elements.

Self-efficacy is a belief in one’s own ability to solve problems.

Productivity/creativity is one’s generosity in solving important problems for oneself and others.

Self-concept is the notion that the world is essentially better off by one’s presence in it and/or contributions to it.

I’ve separated three elements of self-esteem, but you should observe that these are interrelated.  It’s hard to believe in your inherent goodness if you aren’t able to give to others in a way that feels meaningful.  Similarly, it’s hard to give meaningfully to yourself and others if you don’t believe you can solve important problems.

These aspects of self-esteem all work together to create an overall feeling about oneself.  

This definition probably requires at least a caveat about boundaries, as many with low self-esteem end up solving too many problems for the wrong people.  But that’s a topic for another day.

People begin to develop self-esteem at a young age through their participation in their family system, eventually translating positive feelings in the family to more complex systems over time.  A child will try to replicate positive experiences at home (or compensate for negative experiences) by becoming successful academically and socially at school.  After school, a similar process happens when you find a job and build close relationships.

Not everyone does this successfully, though.  As an adult, one of the best ways to do this remedial work of (re)building self-esteem is to develop good habits.  

Habits are the ideal product of taking big, abstract, global problems and making them into behavioral processes.  You become more self-efficacious by solving problems every day.  You become better at providing value to others by practicing ways of providing value to yourself and others in small ways daily.  You build a stronger self-concept by offering value to deserving others day-in, day-out.

Habits build self-reliance

Here’s another aspect of self to explore in the context of habits: self-reliance.  Self-reliance in casual parlance usually equates to not needing others.  That’s not what I mean here.

In this context, I use self-reliance to mean trusting oneself.  In other words, we can rely on ourselves to bridge the gap between where we are and what we desire in the long term.  We can rely on ourselves to complete what we say we need to do to function in the world.  And, we can rely on ourselves to take steps to bring our sense of self in alignment with our values.

The essence of self-reliance is trust.  Can we trust that we will continue to move in the direction we aspire to go?  If I want to be more fit and healthy, can I count on myself to go to the gym? To eat better?

As I’ve discussed, habits are not about getting it now.  Habits don’t help us achieve instant gratification.  Habits help us believe we can get what we want eventually.  This means we need faith, belief, and trust.  

Doing a small thing, day in and day out is how we achieve faith, belief, and trust.  Once we believe in ourselves, then we really have something valuable.

Habits reduce overwhelm

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.  

While I don’t condone eating cute, large, sentient, endangered species, habits are at the heart of this truism.  

Big, overwhelming tasks require the same kind of system that allows water to cut through rock.  Slow, deliberate, unrelenting, repeated effort.  

While most people recognize that the best way to fight overwhelm is to break a task down into smaller steps, it can be hard to do in practice.  Breaking things down into smaller steps is cognitive and strategic.  Habits are the behavioral version of this.  

Action precedes motivation.  Just start.  Do something.  Anything.  Once you have broken inertia and have a bit of momentum, then being strategic–that is, making a list of small steps–will likely happen organically.

Again.  Just start.  Once you’ve started, strategy and “breaking it down” into bite-sized portions will follow naturally.  

In steps it looks like this:

1. Just start with anything.  Do something.
2. Once you feel hopeful, have momentum, and a hint of motivation, begin to think strategically.  Break the task down into constituent habits.  Make the habits so small you can’t possibly fail to complete them daily.
3. Repeat until the task is complete.  Or, in the case of perpetual tasks, like fitness, repeat forever.
4. Revise as necessary.  For example, change the habit to something more effective, easier, smaller, and/or easier to integrate into your daily routines.

Habits are effective

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.  

In previous bullet points I’ve addressed how habits work.  Ultimately, the only way to be convinced of the efficacy of deploying habits in your life is to try them out.  

Until you’ve experienced the magic of habits in your own life, you’ll remain skeptical.  This is true of any self-help advice you read.

Think of something you’ve struggled to start, change, complete, etc.  

Apply the advice from this article.  

Approach a solution from the perspective of habit formation.  

Enjoy the results.

The Canon of Habit Books

The Bible of Habit books: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

James Clear’s 1998 best-selling book on habits is the place to start if you’re just getting started learning about habits.  Clear writes in an extremely engaging manner, weaving relevant social science in with masterful storytelling.  

What’s more, Clear offers extremely practical wisdom on how to begin implementing habits into the reader’s daily life.

The technician’s guide to habits: Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything

BJ Fogg, the author of Tiny Habits, is a behavioral scientist at Stanford University who has written the authoritative technical manual for engineering small behavior changes that you can repeat indefinitely.

Fogg is an accomplished storyteller in his own right.  I read the audiobook of Tiny Habits, which the author narrates himself.  The significance of this can only be fully appreciated by hearing Fogg tell the backstory in his own voice.

Suffice it to say, that the habits Fogg extolls allowed him to accomplish the feat of narrating a full-length non-fiction work–an achievement he likely would never have been able to imagine himself doing in his younger years.

I credit Fogg for creating such a comprehensive, detailed user manual for the creation of tiny habits.  The book is a testament to how even the simple act of creating a small habit is worth breaking down in a patient way so anyone can reap the benefits of habit formation.

This is a fairly long book that requires significant interest in the subject to read all the way through.  It’s not boring, but it is thorough.  I’d recommend starting with Clear’s book to see if you enjoy the topic enough to do a deeper dive.

My personal favorite: Elastic Habits: How To Create Smarter Habits that Adapt to Your Day

Stephen Guise’s book on habit has probably garnered the least acclaim of any of these books, but I found it to make one of the more unique and powerful contributions to the popular literature on habits.  He argues that elasticity–not rigidity–is the key to making habits last.  And, making habits last is the key to making them effective.  

Flexibility, Guise argues, is an underrated but essential aspect of strength.  Think gymnasts instead of body builders.

Guise presents an elaborate system of how he manages habits in his own life.  The author’s system of habits is a useful reference point, but also worth taking with a grain of salt.  The best parts of the book are how he connects habit formation to the development of compassionate, self-discipline.

Elastic Habits is an incredibly empowering work of self-help.  In a subtle manner, this book offers enough guidance to be immediately actionable while also emphasizing the importance of customizing habits to your life.  And of course, customization means having habits that can be flexibly adapted to align with the demands of your day and general motivation levels.

My caveat with this recommendation is that I’m not sure I would have enjoyed the book so much if I had not read other books first.  I was already sold on the importance of habits before reading this, making the concept of elasticity feel like an extremely surprising and delightful cheat code to an established relationship with habit-building.

A Narrative Classic: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

If you’re looking for tips, tricks, and practical strategies for integrating habits into your daily life, Charles Duhigg’s book is not the best option.  The Power of Habit is a well-told series of stories that argues that habit lies at the heart of many human virtues and success stories.  

Charles Duhigg’s classic book on habit is an engaging read with page-turning stories.  My frustration with the book is that the term habit lacks conceptual clarity.  Many phenomena that Duhigg describes don’t seem to fit with recognizable definitions of habit.  That is, certain anecdotes have been incorporated into the narrative structure of the book in order to advance the argument that habits are indeed powerful.

Duhigg is, after all, a journalist and not a social scientist.  As a writer and storyteller, he does well.  Ultimately, I do believe his thesis about habits–I’m just not sure the examples he chose truly count as strong evidence in support of that thesis.  

At the end of the day, the success of Duhigg’s book speaks for itself.  It’s sold tons of copies and is extremely well-reviewed.  It’s worth a read, but if you ask me, the first three on the list would all be better places to start.  

Wrapping Up

Human beings are conservative.  Even when our experiences are painful, we repeat them because we know we can survive them.  We choose the devil we know.  

But change is possible.  Psychotherapy accomplishes change through collaborative work with a skilled therapist.  Together with an effective therapist, you can systematically break down old templates that would otherwise repeat on autopilot.  New behaviors emerge gradually out of new perspectives of yourself and the world around you.

But many people don’t want to rely on the incremental progress of therapy.  In fact, many don’t even trust that the work they do with a therapist is accomplishing anything.  Trusting your unconscious to create innovative solutions to longstanding problems can be a leap of faith that’s too far for many people.

So what then?  How can change happen through the conscious mind (i.e., force of will) alone?

That’s where habits come in.

I’ve made the case in this piece that habits offer a sneaky way of making change palatable to a recalcitrant mind.

Most efforts to change, especially the big efforts born of fleeting inspiration, fail miserably.  The desired change is too great.  The effort is too unsustainable.  The expectation is too great.

In the end, big efforts to change end in inoculation against future campaigns for change.  Failed efforts destroy hope.

Habits, when applied skillfully and thoughtfully, offer a more successful path.  Start small.  Detach from expectations.  Focus on consistency and process.  

Over time, imperceptibly, you will become different.  You can change the fabric of self, of identity.  You are what you do every day.  So, do what you want to be–no matter how small the actions are at first.

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