This post is about how you can sustain atomic habits that will change your life. Daily micro good habits compound and hence impact your life in an atomic way.
The key is to start small (i.e. you should not dread it) so that you can sustain the good habit. This is when your habit becomes atomic. Don’t say you will start running 5km/day, instead tell yourself you will run 2 mins/day. Once you start getting used to running 2 mins/day and gain the confidence that you are keeping up with your personal goal, it will be just a matter of weeks before you achieve running 5km/day.
I now have 20 atmomic habits that have become part of my life..and the best part is that they don’t feel difficult to me now while they seemed to be the hardest thing to do in the past. Two best examples are reading 1 book a month and daily flossing. I succeeded in making daily reading and daily flossing a part of my daily routine last year. How did this happen?
I learned one of the most important life lessons through Duolingo, the free language app. The lesson is the power of daily bite-sized achievement.
I started learning French on the language app, it was an easy decision to start as the app’s free. I’d always been interested in the language but never thought I’d be able to speak it. The pronounciation seemed too distant from what I thought was suited for me. Since the app was free and I had a friend who had started on the app for a few months, I decided to download and start. It was easy, simple vocabularies like ‘garcon’ and ‘çhat’ and the best part was that it only took a few questions to hit 1 day streak. In summary, I learned that achieving the milestone of 100 days streak was extremely easy and doable while it is a big deal! Having gained the knowledge that it isn’t difficult to do small tasks (3 mins/day) adds up to a big deal (today, I’m at 707 day streak!) gave me the confidence that I really can achieve big through 3 easy minutes a day. As long as I sustained it on a daily basis consistently.
Back to reading 1 book a month. This item had been in my new year resolution list for about 20 years and I had never been able to achieve reading beyond maybe 3 books a year. Leveraging on my Duolingo experience, in January 2023, I changed 1 book a month goal to 1 page a day. I must say I only started on 1 page a day in mid 2023 but it didn’t matter as by Dec 2023, I had read 15 books! It was one of the most amazing feelings for me to actually accomplish a 20 year old unattainable goal, just like that! It was really just like that. All thanks to the lesson from Duolingo. Once I started on telling myself that I just need to read 1 page a day, it wasn’t a daunting/dreadful task to pick up a book by my bedside table to do just that. Psychologically, reading just 1 page a day has almost zero barrier to execution and once I started on the 1 page, rarely I would read just that page as I would continue for a chapter at least. As of May 2024, I’m onto my 15th book of the year ◡̈
Flossing. Wow. Another daunting habit I wanted to own but failed every year for the past 15 years. I would floss daily for the 2-3 days following my semi-annual dental check up but that would be it. In 2023, after Duolingo and reading 1 page a day, I told myself to just do it. Even if I’m not flossing properly, just go one round for the bottom then the top teeth. Needless to say, I now feel weird if I don’t floss at night.
As per my prior blog my list of 20 good habits ranges across the 9 aspects of life I care about and I’m far from being done. I plan on layering on good habits until I systemize getting to be my own role model. By systemizing, I mean it will be impossible for me not to become my own role model. Reading books daily will make me a wise intellectual and interesting person for sure, in the next 20 years…how not to? My weekly face masks, my daily skin regime of Vitamin C, Vitamin B, Moisturizer, Sunblock in the morning and Retinoid in the night, semi-annual visit to my Korean dermatologist will ensure my skin ages well!
Weekly blog writing is the 21st addition to my habits list. I’m excited! It’s Saturday today and I feel accomplished to be on week 2 of habitualising my new habit. I have my personal training session later in the afternoon. Executing on these good habits daily, weekly and monthly gives me the inner confidence and fulfilment that I’m well on my way to becoming my own role model. So if you are someone like me who’s been rolling the same new year resolutions for decades, I suggest you break down the goal into undreadful size (e.g. 1 min run, 1 min exercise, 1 page/day etc) just to kick start on the execution.
Starting without dreading the task is key.
Interestingly, I have not read the bestseller by James Clear. I am confident that his message is similar.
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