If you’re hanging out with the rights sorts of people, I won’t be the only one to suggest that your goals aren’t the thing to focus on for the new year. Your habits matter a lot more.
Of course, your goals are important. Set them. Make your near-term goals modest and achievable, and they can serve as welcome milestones or breathing spots along the road. If you make reasonable goals for the short term, they can be much more empowering than overwhelming. (And if in the back of your head, you dream big for the long term, you might just find the motivation to keep on going.)
But goals are not everything: “Lose 25 pounds.” “Eat more vegetables.” “Go to the gym more.” “Run a mile in under 7 minutes.” “Release our biggest album yet.””Sell X copies.” Whether specific or vague, none of this addresses the how. What new habits will you adopt? What new systems will you have in place?
Take a simple resolution, something many of us have addressed at some point in our lives: “Stop biting my nails.” That seems like a perfectly specific goal. But it is simply a goal to stop a habit that you already have. This is nearly impossible.
Think instead of what new habit you’d like to adopt in its place: “Start filing or trimming nails once every week.” Make this new habit your goal. Better yet, make your plan to adopt this goal even more specific, and turn it into a “system.” You might say: “Trim nails once each weekend.” Or better yet: “Trim nails Mondays after showering.”
When I was finally able to quite smoking cigarettes after 15 years, it was because I chose a somewhat better, healthier habit to replace it with: Smoking a large tobacco pipe once, no more than twice, each day.
I did this for one full year until it became incompatible with my next new habit: Riding a bike instead of taking the subway whenever the bike would be faster. (It turns out that in New York City, this is almost always.)
Similarly, goals like “eat better”, “lose ten pounds” or “go on a diet” don’t tend to work on their own. These are vague and insipid mandates. What are the new habits and systems you’ll adopt? “Eat beans or lentils whenever I would normally think to eat bread, potatoes, pasta or rice” is the kind of thing that does work instead.
(This what I tried after seeing myself in my first video series and realizing that I developed a little bit of a paunch. With this method, I had essentially lost it within a few weeks.)
This year, one of my goals has been to quit wasting so much time on Facebook, focus on more fulfilling creative outlets, and start seeing friends in real life more often. But again, these vague goals aren’t worth much on their own.
Instead, I gave myself new habits to keep. You’re witnessing one of them right now: “Write one blog post each day instead of writing on Facebook.”
(Incidentally, that’s another little trick that helps: Make your resolution known to others. Then you’ll really have something at stake.)
You might also have noticed that I jumped the gun on this particular resolution by beginning it over a week ago. That’s another tactic that can help: You don’t need to wait for a special occasion to make a change. “Now” is always the best time.
You can apply this kind of thinking to anything: Practicing, producing, promotion, expanding your network, or exposing yourself to more inspiring culture. You might end up changing a lot more for the better than you ever reasonably expected.
Just be sure to take on these new habits no more than one or two at a time. Depending on who you ask, it may take anywhere from 20 to 90 days to form a new habit to the point at which it becomes effortless and automatic.
Rest assured, given time and application, the new habits will form. The question is: Which ones to choose? And, are you willing to commit to change? That part is up to you.
Whether we’d like to believe it or not, we are creatures of habit. So pick yours, or you might just find yourself living a life full of habits that you never actually chose.