Habits before goals

Why some tasks become habits and some don’t.

I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to meet any goals, we need to first form habits. Habits make everything we do to reach that goal effortlessly. Before we even think about goals, we need to do the tasks or practices that lead us there. Don’t even think about the goal, if we can’t form appropriate habits.

I recently had success with sticking to a skin care routine in the morning and at night. So, I am dissecting it and applying what made it work to other tasks that you would make routine.

Here is what I did:

1. I followed a skin care routine everyday for 8 days. Found tremendous improvement in my complexion.
2. On day 9, I encountered a lack of motivation incidence, I still did the skincare routine.
3. On day 10, I encountered a lack of motivation incident, I still did the skincare routine
4. On day 11, I do the skincare routine just as a way of my night, didn’t even need to debate on whether I should do it or not. No excuses came up. Just did it.
5. I’ve been doing this for 15 days. The improvement is visible.

As I sit and think about how I manage to turn daily skincare into a habit, I wanted to figure out what it is that I did that made the routine stick.

I figured out these things about routine skincare:

1. There is absolutely no drawback from doing routine skin care.
2. All the outcomes of daily skincare routine are good.
3. There isn’t anything else you can do to replace it.
4. The more you do it, the more improvement you can SEE.

Above is why the skincare routine become my habit.

So, let’s apply the above four points with another habit that someone is trying to form. The one and only way one can stick to the below habit is that it needs to meet the four conditions or criteria above.

The habit: Study data science skills every day for 4 hours.

1. True or false: There is absolutely no drawback from doing this task? False: if you spend no time doing data science, you could be spending time to invest in singer songwriter career. This career is more lucrative. Here, this person cannot establish this habit, because they failed the first condition.
2. True or false: All the outcomes of studying data science for 4 hours are good. Also false. The outcome of doing this means less hour doing singing. So failed two conditions.
3. True or false: this routine is irreplaceable. Maybe. So false.
4. True or false: You can visibly see or quantify the improvement as you do more of it. It’s a maybe, you may make more money because you worked hard, but monetary reward has so many meanings behind it and it’s not the work quality alone that determines the money. The better one is a quantifiable score that also makes you feel good.

This person is not going to establish this routine as habit.

Let’s put yourself in this person’s shoes, how can you make this a habit? You won’t achieve until you figure this out. So, if you really want to form a habit out of this task, try to get the above four conditions to be as true to you as possible.

What can you do????

I can think of a couple of ways right now:

To meet condition 1: Exhaust all options for other possibilities. So, if you’re thinking about singing as a back up for data career, you need to literally find something that prevent you from achieving this. Maybe lose your singing voice forever. Do not feed this alternative path. Burn the damn bridge. That’s the only solution.

To meet condition 4: Set up a quantifiable way to measure improvement. Devise a measurable score based on the results of sustaining this task. High values should make you feel great.

If you find other ways to meet the four conditions above, please share and shed light on this in the comment section!