It’s the little things that often make the biggest difference. It’s a truism for many aspects of life, but especially for success in habit formation.
While there have been times when I’ve made big, lasting changes on the strength of one powerful insight, there have been many more times when the changes have been incremental. Sometimes these incremental changes were what paved the way to a big transformation. More often, though, the changes weren’t sustainable. I’d keep up the new habit for a week or two; a few months even. And then a minor disruption would kick me off the wagon and leave the tenuous habit in the dirt.
It’s not surprising, really. All those little habits collectively take a considerable chunk of time to perform regularly. Not so much time that I couldn’t free it up if I really tried, but enough time that the number seems discouraging. Of course there’s a well-popularized solution: Tiny Habits. Make the habits ridiculously small. Play one chord. Review one flash card. Do one push-up. Write one word. This way, practice of the new habit takes almost no time and, more importantly, almost no effort.
The potential for discouragement is extremely low. The potential for success is extremely high. It’s ridiculous, yes. But it’s also motivating as hell.
So we get started. It’s really easy. Too easy. So we overshoot our goal. Most times by a lot. Which is, of course, the point. The trick is working. And soon enough, we play the guitar for 15 minutes every day. We write 300 words every day. We’re on a roll. It feels great.
And then we institute our “new normal” as the definition of success. Now we “have to” write 300 words every day to check off the writing habit as successfully completed. And all of a sudden, it becomes an effort. We procrastinate. We make exceptions. We make excuses. We fall behind. We quit.
We may shrug and say the habit wasn’t for us after all. Or we may beat ourselves up for our failure to follow through – again. Needless to say, neither reaction is particularly helpful.
Well, what if we never changed our definition of success? What if writing one word remained the bar to clear? It’d still be laughably easy. We’d still feel slightly ridiculous to praise ourselves for our minuscule success.
But that’s the point: No matter how small the success, it’s still a success. And once we’ve lined up a long, unbroken string of successes, we’ll have developed an entirely new habit that could be transformative in many areas of our lives: The habit of keeping the promises we make to ourselves.