Harness Your Habits
If you do the same thing you did yesterday today, you will get the same result as yesterday. Your life is a sum total of the choices you make, and being intentional about those decisions is what will change your life. While we’d like to think it’s the huge decisions, like where to go to college, our career, or where to live, most of our life is in our habits. For it’s the habits that build up over time. Each incremental choice adds to your life, day after day, week after week, and year after year. We can accomplish so much more than we think when we align our habits to our goals.
When we think about changing our life, it begins with our mindset, and it changes through our habits. As your habits change, your life changes. This doesn’t mean that we need to have dramatically different days each 24-hour period in order to have amazing results. Not every day needs to be the next idea that revolutionizes the world. But every day needs to be one that slowly revolutionizes your life because your choices are connecting you to the person you are becoming. That is more powerful than we give thought, because the little things add up. Even just five minutes of one habit a day ends up to thirty hours at the end of the year. Just like you don’t try to brush your teeth for hours every few months, choose habits that you can do every day, little by little.
Dream of who you want to be. Don’t over-obsess about the end goal, because I promise you, that will change. But consider what kind of person you want to be — the goals, character traits, and values you wish to hold for yourself. After you have identified the person you want to become, choose habits and make decisions that are connected to that person. You can even ask yourself questions from outside of yourself — would a creative entrepreneur spend time doing this? Would a person of integrity stand up in this situation? As you develop the persona of your identity, you make choices that line up with your identity. Now go, harness your habits today, and achieve results that are different tomorrow.
