The most popular time for goal setting is probably the new year, those enviable New Year’s Resolutions that you and your friends proudly broadcast on statuses in the misguided belief that this public commitment will get them accomplished.
Since you’ve probably set a New Year’s Resolution or two—for example: “I want to read 20 books and improve my knowledge.” Have you been able to do that even though we are almost ending June?
I think almost everyone has had this resolution at some point. In most cases, you recover from your New Year’s Eve binge on January 1st, buy some books on January 2nd or download a book app, force yourself to read 5-6 books over the ensuing months mostly out of guilt because you spent so much money and you feel like you should use it. But you have no idea what you’re doing.
And it’s February 1st and you’re back to your old self, wondering how it is that all of your books seem to be collecting dust at the same time.
Yes. The struggle is real.
People tend to rely too much on self-discipline and eschew forming useful habits. They tend to bite off more than they can chew, so to speak, setting goals that are far above their ability or knowledge level and then becoming frustrated when they make little to no progress towards them. People are tempted to take “shortcuts” to achieve a goal that may actually sabotage themselves in the long run, like reading summaries instead of the full book, or using shortcuts that undermine the learning process.
That’s all true. But I’m here to suggest something else.
“Read 20 books by the end of the year” is a flawed goal to begin with. That’s because it’s borne from the same spending mindset that keeps people from achieving their reading goals—or in this case, keeps them from developing a sustainable reading habit. They view life in the overly-simplistic terms of “Do a lot of X, eventually get Y.”
Just like forcing yourself to work and save for 20 years is unlikely to get you rich, forcing yourself to read dozens of books quickly is unlikely to make you a well-rounded reader and keep you engaged. Goals like this require an intense amount of effort, yet they never seem to “stick.” Eventually, your energy and discipline run out and you fall right back to the same person you were, except now you feel defeated.
That’s because it’s better to invest your limited focus and energy on building habits rather than specific goals. Just like you want to take the money you earn and put it to work for you, you want to take the effort you expend in changing yourself and put it to work changing you as well.
People usually don’t focus on habits because goals sound much sexier in our minds. They feel more motivating in the moment when we think about them. There’s a clear image of a certain result in our head and that gets us excited.
Habits, on the other hand, don’t sound as sexy in our heads. They’re long-term and repetitive, which makes them seem boring. And there’s no clear image one can imagine for “reading for 30 minutes every morning” or “completing one book every two weeks.” You don’t get this rush of inspiration imagining yourself reading a chapter every day. You don’t lay in bed at night fantasizing about your daily reading routine.
Goals are a one-time bargain. They are the spending mindset. “I will spend X amount of energy to receive Y reward.” Habits are an investing mindset. Habits require one to invest one’s efforts for a little while and then take the rewards of that effort and re-invest them in a greater effort to form even better habits.
This is why so many people who set ambitious reading goals end up abandoning them. They focus on singular goals in life rather than developing underlying habits. So when their energy and discipline run out (and it always does because self-discipline is limited) they revert back to their original reading habits.
With habits, on the other hand, there’s no single endpoint that must be reached. The only goal of habits is that the goal is never over; it’s a simple daily or weekly repetition that one does until muscle memory and brain chemistry kick in and you’re now performing the desired action on autopilot. With goals, every time you sit down to read feels like a challenge. With habits, after a while, it feels harder to not read than it does to read.
Another reason why typical New Year’s Resolutions suck is because of the time horizon. If I say something like, “I want to read 20 books this year,” it becomes that much easier for me to put off starting the goal until July, August, or whenever, at which point it becomes almost entirely unfeasible.
Some research shows that habits only need about 30 days of consistent effort to install themselves into our brains. At that point, they begin to become automatic.
So screw New Year’s Resolutions. Adopt New Month’s Resolutions, or as they’re more commonly known, 30-day challenges.
Pick a habit you want to adopt and then do it every day for 30 days. It’s just 30 days. Anybody can do something for 30 days. Once you do it, it should begin to feel automatic, and you can then start adding more depth or knowledge to work into the habit, or you can move on to another habit.
The correct way to read a lot of books, as I discussed, is to start small and then intelligently re-invest what you’ve read, so stop trying to scale linearly and instead scale exponentially. this is the same for other goals.
I’ve also seen that some habits scale more exponentially than others—i.e., some habits provide higher rates of return because they provide benefits that then make adopting subsequent habits easier.
Therefore, it makes sense to use your energy to develop habits with the highest rate of return first, and then move on to other desired habits later.
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