You’re reading The Road doesn’t go anywhere! How To Form Habits That Are Crucial For Long Term Self-Improvement, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
To understand success, you need to know first that there is no road towards success. Ever saw a road moving? Probably not, as it’s the cars, trucks, bicycles and the pedestrians who move on it. The road is just a platform on which everything already is standing still, it’s the power to move that gets things going and make things reach point B from A. Similarly, everyone knows what success is and how to get there but the biggest differentiation comes in the form of the habits you are slave to.
We have all heard of great stories of failure and how people overcame them to become utterly successful but it’s not about how much you fail or how you don’t give up after failing as it’s not about willpower, motivation, inspiration or anything else. A habit of doing something keeps you going on no matter if failures or dead ends come your way. Your habits make you push your way through. But rarely do we incorporate new and better habits into our self as we have a bad propensity to follow whatever habits we made by accident, pure chance or its just who we are. To push forwards towards success, you need habits, good ones and great ones both and forming them might be immensely difficult but don’t worry there is structured way to inculcate them gradually in your life.
Grow rich slowly:
To first form any great habit you must let go of one that destroys them all. The habit of instant gratification is your biggest enemy when it comes to doing something great. When we want fast rewards, we cannot settle down, work hard and commit ourselves towards things which take time. Growing rich overnight is a myth. It takes years of determination and perseverance to achieve something worthwhile. Nor was Rome built in a day neither did Facebook become the biggest social networking site overnight.
Rome was great so is Facebook, but building them took time and steady work. So to first incorporate any new great habit, let go of the worst ever habit you can ever have i.e. wanting instant results from anything you do, if you don’t, you’ll start everything with unmatched zeal and passion only to fizzle out very soon and never come back to pick up that habit ever again.
For e.g. you want to make regular exercise as part of your habits in order to get a great body and you hit the gym with passion pumping iron, but in a month, you look at the mirror and barely see any noticeable difference and you stop doing it. Your dream of getting a great body lay shattered and you remain demotivated to take up regular exercise as a habit ever again. Never opt for instant results.
Be Realistic:
Strong habits bring even stronger results but one of the biggest problems is over-committing to your habit because you have set unrealistic expectations as to the results you want. Surely you would want to earn $100K from your writing blog every month and you are willing to put in all the effort to give as much time as possible towards the habit of writing great stuff. You write and write, but setting such an expectation from the result at just the start is asking for too much from your end. The chances of earning that amount of money in a few months are increasingly remote.
Earning $100K from your blog is achievable but for e.g. it takes a year and your effort needs to be phased out. Don’t try to push a year’s work in just two months, you will undermine you creativity and suffer from burn out by heading this way and your blog will suffer eventually, fizzling out before it even got going. Set realistic time frames and expectations to not only get the best results but to make sure that the habit, for e.g. writing, stays with you for life.
Free up your time:
For doing something new, we need time for it. But before you pick up a new habit and settle it in a particular time frame, make sure that the work you previously did in that time frame is taken care off by someone else or you are ready to forfeit it, otherwise you’ll be stuck with cramming another habit within your already limited daily time schedule.
For e.g. you want to take up designing apps as a new habit or want to incorporate meditating as daily habit once you come home from work, but you are taking care of your aging parents in that time frame and if you pick up the new habit, either your parents would suffer due to your absence or you have to do things for them in a shorter time now. In either case, you’ll be left flabbergasted and exhausted at the amount of work you need to do, leaving you incapable of following your habit diligently because you lack the necessary peace of mind.
To incorporate a new habit, make sure that you have ample free time towards pursuing it like either you shift your parents to your sibling’s home or get elderly home care services, so that there is nothing bothering you when you take up the new habit.
Good habits are important and everyone knows that but where we lack the most is the mindset needed to keep them for so long that they become second nature. Ensure that you not just aspire to have good habits but are taking necessary steps to plan their way in into your life.
You’ve read The Road doesn’t go anywhere! How To Form Habits That Are Crucial For Long Term Self-Improvement, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.
Sig Nordal 