Are you sick of constantly making promises to yourself and hardly ever coming through? Maybe you are dissatisfied with your life but can’t seem to make a change? No, this is not a cheesy (sleazy?) commercial. It’s your ultimate guide to building good habits (a.k.a getting shit done).
Let’s start by making one thing clear: your failures are not necessarily due to a lack of willpower or motivation (although these could be contributing factors).
It’s usually a failure to adopt an effective executional framework that could consistently deliver results – regardless of how you feel on any given day. Growing up, we were never practically taught how to get shit done. Instead, we were always told that we just had to do it.
Ultimate Executional Framework
At Sapiens Maximus, we believe that the ultimate executional framework is one that relies on habits and systems instead of willpower and/or motivation. A system that takes emotions out of the equation so that even when you slip, you still win over the long-term.
This article gives you the tools you need. No bullshit, no vague concepts and no fluff. Just actionable and scientifically substantiated advice.
You don’t have to use all of the tips provided simultaneously. You should be able to see real results by consistently applying one or two. If you apply all 10 for a meaningful period of time, you would have taken a substantial step towards metamorphosing into a Sapiens Maximus – the best version you could be.
Content Breakdown
You should also check out our ultimate guide to breaking bad habits. While these two articles substantially overlap, we’ve designed each article so that it stands on its own.
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
Building Good Habits Tip #1: Make The Necessary Mental Shift
Homo Sapiens has intuitively understood the power of self-perception throughout the ages. The Buddha said that “what you think, so shall you become”. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that “our life is what our thoughts make it”.
Interestingly, scientific studies demonstrating this basic precept are mounting. For example, one study on adolescents with heart disease has shown that self-perception explained the most variance in behavioural and health-related quality of life.
Another study led by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck showed that signs of deteriorating willpower and self-control (i.e. “ego depletion”) were manifest only in test subjects who believed that willpower is a finite source.
The outcome of these scientific studies and others is hardly surprising. It’s something people have intuitively understood since ancient times.
The point is this: the first step towards building a habit is to change the way you perceive yourself. It’s about having the right self-dialogue and, ultimately, a deeply rooted image of yourself that is compatible with your goals.
While this is the most abstract and hard to action tip on the list, it’s the most important. Below are some practical suggestions to help you implement it.
Draft a Personal Manifesto
In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill recommends writing a personal manifesto setting out exactly who you want to be and what you want to achieve. While Hill primarily focuses on monetary success, you could use this strategy for any objective. This includes the kind of person you want to become. Interestingly, Bruce Lee allegedly used this process himself. Below is a letter he wrote in 1969 well before achieving any of his success and fame.
“My Definite Chief Aim”:
“I, Bruce Lee, will be the first highest paid Oriental super star in the United States. In return I will give the most exciting performances and render the best of quality in the capacity of an actor. Starting 1970 I will achieve world fame and from then onward till the end of 1980 I will have in my possession $10,000,000. I will live the way I please and achieve inner harmony and happiness.” – Bruce Lee, Jan 1969
Draft a personal manifesto of who you want to be. Make sure to read it every morning and night. If your mind is already focused on a new identity that embraces health and wealth, one thing will be certain enough. You’ll be in a substantially better position than someone who is “aiming” to workout or save money but who self-identifies as lazy and wasteful.
Your self-perception and self-dialogue are immensely powerful. This is not some “New Age”, vague BS statement. Instead, as we have seen, it is a scientifically substantiated and supremely practical fact. It’s time you start using it to your advantage.
How Would [Role Model] Act?
“Without a ruler to do it against, you can’t make crooked straight.”
– Seneca
Are there people you admire? What do you admire about them? People you admire a.k.a. “Role Models” don’t have to be people in your life. They don’t even have to be real. They could be completely fictional characters – from movies you’ve seen to books you’ve read.
The key thing is for these “Role Models” to have characteristics that you want to develop. You don’t have to aspire to be like these people in every way. You could instead cherry pick the characteristics that you most admire about them. For example, a fitness icon could be a degenerate person. You could still model your fitness journey after them but look for moral guidance elsewhere.
The key thing when building a habit or, more fundamentally, a new identity is to ask yourself: How would [Role Model] deal with this situation? Would they skip a workout because they are feeling demotivated? Or would they consistently execute because feelings don’t count for shit?
By comparing your intended action against the action of a “Role Model”, you make what’s crooked straight. Gradually, if you behave like your “Role Model” long enough, you develop whatever characteristics you admire about them.
Win the “Identity Election”
James Clear uses a good analogy in Atomic Habits. Once you decide who you want to be, prove it to yourself with your daily actions. Just like an election, your new identity doesn’t have to unanimously win. It just needs to get a majority of the votes.
When done consistently over months and years, the virtuous cycle becomes ever stronger. Your desired identity dictates your daily actions and your daily actions further reinforce your desired identity.
Building Good Habits Tip #2: Use Implementation Intention
Wikipedia (undoubtedly the most authoritative and academically rigorous website out there 🙃) provides a helpful definition of an implementation intention. An implementation intention is “a self-regulatory strategy in the form of an “if-then plan” that can lead to better goal attainment, as well as help in habit and behavior modification“.
So, how do you leverage the power of implementation intention? While there is a substantial body of literature on the technique, the core message isn’t complicated: have a clear and precise action plan.
Below is a template / example you could use.
You commit yourself to [Performing Habit] for [Duration] on [Day] at [Time] in [Place]. For example, I will do my (pre-planned) leg workout for 45 minutes on Mondays and Thursdays at 6pm @ my local gym.
While the technique is simple, it’s highly effective.
Implementation Intention: Study Analysis
One study illustrates just how effective this could be. Test subjects were split into three groups:
- A control group;
- A “motivation” group. This is where test subjects learnt about the benefits of physical exercise; and
- An “Implementation Intention” group. In addition to learning about physical benefits, third group participants were asked to formulate a concrete plan of action on when and where they will exercise.
Results with respect to the first and second groups were roughly the same, with a minority of people exercising. This is despite the fact that test subjects in the motivational group did feel substantially more ‘motivated’ to exercise. In the implementation intention group, an overwhelming majority ended up exercising.
Why Does Implementation Intention Work?
It is not difficult to see why implementation intention would deliver better habit building results than relying on motivation alone. When you come up with a specific action plan, you are forced to consider any logistical obstacles. By extension, you are forced to develop specific ways around them.
Evidently, creating an action plan also helps you remember to perform the intended habit. It also makes you more committed to act. This is especially the case when you share your implementation intention with someone else, thus creating accountability. This is further discussed in building good habits tip #9 below.
Building Good Habits Tip #3: Set Your Environment For Success
Willpower is overrated. A key to long-term sustainable change is optimally designing your environment. The objective is for you to minimise reliance on fleeting emotions such as motivation. This concept has been widely discussed in the habits building literature – from Atomic Habits to Tiny Habits and beyond.
As James Clear puts it: “you could either be the victim of your environment or its architect”. Our environment has tremendous influence over our behaviour, whether positive or negative. It’s time you start using this fact to your advantage.
Ideas For Designing Your Environment
So how exactly should we design our environment? Every habit starts with a cue or trigger. One way you could use your environment to your advantage is to make desired cues / triggers obvious.
For example, if you want to take your daily vitamins, don’t stash them in a dark drawer somewhere. Chances are you’ll forget about them. Alternatively, you’ll go out of your way to firstly remember you should take them and to secondly do so.
What you should do instead is make the cue obvious by placing your vitamins on the kitchen table where you usually have your meals. Now every time you have dinner, performing the habit of taking your vitamins is both obvious and easy.
This strategy is also powerful for breaking bad habits – as extensively discussed in this article.
Building Good Habits Tip #4: Scale Down Your Habits
How many times have you committed yourself to doing something BIG, with little more than a vague hope that willpower will carry you through? You tell yourself that this time is going to be different. Yet it rarely ever is. It’s not your fault – like most of us, you just didn’t know any better.
As extensively discussed in this article, motivation is not enough to bridge the gap between wanting to start a new habit and actually doing it. However, this tip focuses on another culprit: aiming too high too early.
Starting out a new habit is already tough as it is. By aiming too high, most people end up feeling overwhelmed. They hate it, rationalize themselves out of it and end up quitting. The battle’s lost before it even begins.
Establish The Habit BEFORE You Optimize It
What most people fail to realize is that merely showing up day in and day out goes a long way in helping you establish the habit. This is regardless of whether you end up performing the habit for minutes or hours.
Forget about working out for an hour each day. Start by doing 10 push-ups. Instead of wanting to meditate for 15 minutes, meditate for 60 seconds.
They key is establishing the habit before you optimize it. Create a routine where you anchor your desired habit to a particular time and place – ideally following an existing habit (as further discussed in Habits Stacking below). Make sure that your anchors allow for the habit to grow over time.
Once the action becomes truly automatic – a habit – you could further develop it so that it meets, or exceeds, your expectations. Below quote captures it brilliantly.
“The essence of Tiny Habits is to take a behaviour you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth.”
– BJ Fogg, Stanford Behavioural Scientist & Author of Tiny Habits
From a Giant Step to a Baby One: What’s Your Excuse?
One key advantage to this approach is that it eliminates most, if not all, of our excuses. Who doesn’t have time to do 10 push-ups a day or meditate for 60 seconds? Regardless of how bad our days are, we should always be able to perform at least the scaled down versions of our habits.
If you think there is hardly a point in performing the scaled down version of a habit, think again. Maintaining consistency is key if we are to successfully stick to our habits over the long-term. Missing a day or two could drastically increase the chances of abandoning the habit altogether – so scale down if you must but DO NOT skip.
Conversely, every day you tick the box, the neural circuits in your brain associated with the habit strengthen. Before you know it, doing the desired habit, even if in its watered down version, becomes second nature.
Building Good Habits Tip #5: Use Habits Stacking
Habits stacking is all about leveraging existing habits to effortlessly build new ones.
Habits stacking works for many of the same reasons implementation intention does. By “stacking” a new habit on top of an existing one, you remove any ambiguity about your intended plan of action. As we have extensively discussed in this article, clarity is key when building new habits.
The key difference between habits stacking and implementation intention is the nature of the anchor used. Whereas implementation intention anchors new habits in a place and/or time, the anchor for habits stacking is existing habits.
Habits Stacking: Some Examples
For most of us, our morning habits are the strongest. For example, we wake up > use the bathroom > wash our hands > brush our teeth > take a shower.
When using Habits Stacking, you could add the desired habit to any part of this chain. See below for an example of an enhanced version of this morning routine.
Wake up > drink a glass of water > use the bathroom > read a page of your desired book while on the toilet (my preference is to read a quote from Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic) > wash your hands > brush your teeth > floss > do your morning abs routine and/or workout > take a shower.
4 to 6 weeks in, your brain should start automatically associating these activities together. This in turn makes them effortless. Before you know it, flossing after brushing will become as intuitive as washing your hands after using the bathroom.
Building Good Habits Tip #6: Intermingle Your Habits
Intermingling habits is about doing COMPLEMENTARY actions simultaneously. The key word is “complementary”. As we will discuss in our upcoming articles on focus and productivity, multi-tasking is counter-productive and is generally not recommended.
However, intermingling habits is a special kind of multi-tasking. Maybe the only kind of multi-tasking that makes sense. It’s about doing things that require different parts of our brains and that wouldn’t therefore compete for our attention.
An example would be listening to an audiobook while cleaning the dishes or driving to work. Another one would be reading a useful article while using the bathroom instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media.
Optimising “Dead” Time?
The key to intermingling habits is making the most of necessary but otherwise “dead” time. We all have to use the bathroom – so why don’t we pair this with a productive habit like reading a helpful blog (instead of compulsively scrolling through social media)? If you have to clean the dishes, why don’t you develop the habit of simultaneously listening to an audiobook or a helpful podcast?
Start thinking about “dead” blocks of time in your day that you could be using more productively. You’ll soon realize that this technique could go some way in helping you maximize your time. By simply leveraging “dead” time to perform minuscule habits, you could reap substantial benefits. Especially as the tiny benefits of your habits compound.
Building Good Habits Tip #7: Don’t Break The Chain “DBC”
Get a calendar. Make sure you hang it somewhere conspicuous. For each day you perform your desired habit, put a big X over that day. After couple of days you’ll have a chain. Your mission is simple (but by no means easy): grow this chain without ever breaking it.
While you could technically use a digital habits tracker, we found that doing this with a physical calendar is more effective. There is something oddly satisfying about manually drawing an X for each successful day. However, ultimately, the principle is the same. If in doubt, try both methods and see which one works best for you.
DBC: A Key Caveat
A key caveat with the DBC approach is that it should make sense for you to repeat the habit daily. To state the obvious, you should exercise your good judgment when applying this strategy.
For example, instead of trying to bench-press each day, aim to be physically active instead. This allows you enough flexibility to recover and grow.
In addition, if you are having a tough day, the broad nature of the intended habit that you are tracking allows you to scale it down. This in turn makes it easier for you to stay consistent.
However, ultimately, it’s a balancing act. Although your habits should be flexible, they should still meaningfully push you towards who you want to be. That is, your optimal Sapiens Maximus version. Use this flexibility sensibly, but don’t abuse it.
Lastly, after a while, tracking loses its meaning. If you self-identify as a drug free person (per tip #1), and you have not used drugs FOR A WHILE, you are probably better off not tracking. This is because tracking implicitly forces you to self-identify as someone who is still trying to quit. Identifying yourself as someone who has already quit might be more helpful.
Building Good Habits Tip #8: Never Miss Twice (“NMT”)
Although the recommendation is to never break the chain per the above, life happens. When you miss a habit for a day, don’t despair. Consistency is key. But consistency ≠ perfection.
When you miss your habit for a day, the NMT rule serves as a safety net. By ensuring that you don’t miss your habit twice consecutively, you drastically decrease the chances of abandoning the habit altogether.
In a worst-case scenario, you’ll still do the habit at least half the time. Missing your habit for just one day decreases your chances of sticking to it by 50%. If you miss two days in a row, the chances of abandoning your habit altogether are in excess of 80%.
If you are serious about developing a habit, even if you have to scale down, make sure you tick the box for the day.
Building Good Habits Tip #9: Create Accountability
It is hardly controversial to say that we are wired to seek pleasure and avoid pain. The challenge comes from the mismatch in timelines. What is often pleasurable in the moment is painful in the long term and vice versa.
The key is to use this basic fact to your advantage. You need to create a dynamic where (i) your failure to perform a desired habit becomes immediately painful and (ii) your success in doing so becomes immediately pleasurable. One way to do it is to create accountability.
How Do You Create Accountability?
There are different ways to get there. One tactic is to make your efforts public. For example, Matt D’Avella (a top notch YouTuber) has tried various public 30 day challenges. Every time he fails to execute his habits, the prospect of public humiliation (or perceived public humiliation) likely hangs over his head.
By creating accountability, having nothing to show for at the end of the day is no longer a failure that will haunt you at some point in the future. It becomes almost immediately painful.
Other people use different strategies. For example, automatic donations to an opposing political party. Yet another one would be sharing your progress with someone whose opinion matters to you. For each strategy, there are a number of (free) apps you can use.
Building Good Habits Tip #10: Develop a Support System
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
– Jim Rohn
You should certainly take this quote with a pinch of salt. However, it’s certainly true that your social environment plays a massive role in your development. By extension, it’s key for your success.
As Darren Hardy puts it in The Compound Effect: “According to research by social psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, [the people you habitually associate with] determine as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.”
Having an adequate support system and surrounding yourself with the right people is just as vital when you’re trying to build good habits.
If you want to (1) eat healthy and (2) train, limit the time you spend with friends who are (1) overweight and (2) would rather be couch potatoes than break a sweat. There’s hardly any magic to this logic.
Generally, to the extent possible, design a social environment that aligns with your objectives. If this is not possible at the moment, then the cliché saying applies: stand by yourself instead of standing with the wrong crowd. As you focus on your objectives, the right people start showing up to your life.
In the meantime, your Sapiens Maximus tribe is here for you.
Bottom Line
In this article, we discussed 10 scientifically substantiated strategies for building good habits. We appreciate it’s a lot to take in. In typical Sapiens Maximus fashion, we try to provide you with loads of substantive, actionable content. However, don’t feel overwhelmed. If you consistently apply one of the tips or a combination, you will be doing yourself a ton of good.
We recommend that you also check our ultimate guide to breaking bad habits. From cleaning up your diet to developing an exercise routine, building good habits and breaking bad ones is key. Together, these two articles should provide you with an executional framework that will serve you well regardless of your objectives.
HOWEVER, as we always say at Sapiens Maximus, it’s not knowledge that’s power but applied knowledge. So make sure you consistently practice the tips you learnt.
As always, we wish you good luck on your journey to strength in adversity, calm amidst the storms, relentless resilience and uncompromising health.
Your self-proclaimed family,
The Sapiens Maximus team
Sources & Further Readings
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – James Clear
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – Charles Duhigg
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything – BJ Fogg
Think and Grow Rich – Napoleon Hill
The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success – Darren Hardy
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