Transcription
I have been living by the book "Atomic Habits" for 3 years. How to work with habits? Start counting, exercising, learning to love cleaning. How not to quit after a week? I have answered all these questions for myself over 3 years and will give them to you. How does my life look now? 1,324 days learning English words. 1,294 days writing a diary in English. 1,171 days training my voice. 898 days making shorts. 837 days correcting flat feet, 470 days doing the splits, 348 days running. As soon as I understood the principle of instilling a habit, it became very simple to start doing something and not quit, even for years. Now, whenever I want to start running consistently, I follow a plan that I built according to the principles of the book, and I get the habit 100%. It worked for me with sports, health, cleaning, reading, creating videos, anything. The important thing I learned. A habit is not about the result. It's very desirable for it to be that way, but a habit is a process. If you build it correctly, it will automatically lead to the result. How did it all begin? I read the book in June 2022. Before that, I had been trying to do everything for years: sports, dancing, reading, occasionally. I managed to do it for more than a couple of months. But most often, I quit after a couple of weeks when motivation and willpower ran out. The book seemed like a solution to the problem. I started trying. I started with my old problem in English, I started learning words every day. After a week, I added writing a diary in English. Then I started watching a series. There were a lot of mistakes and problems, but I managed to solve them. I'll talk about them later. After six months, I already had eight daily habits. Approximately four I failed to instill. I did exercises for my sore back, worked with my voice, ran, and the English habits were already in place. The mistakes I made. Reward. At first, I thought that the reward after a sports training session was muscles. That was a big mistake. A reward is not the result of a habit. A reward is something physically pleasant right now. A tasty candy, food, praise, out loud. Setting aside money for a video card, a massage. Second: since I had already mastered the habit method, I could do without a reward. My most frequent mistake: I either forgot about the reward, or decided that I already understood the topic too well and could do without it every time. The habit did not take root in such cases. Next is the cue. A habit starts with a cue. I made many mistakes with it. almost always because the cue was at a moment when I was busy. The alarm went off during a work call. I postponed it, postponed it, and so on until night and didn't do it. And the second main mistake. I always tried to improve my result, as in a tournament. Each time this broke the habit. There are days when everything goes wrong. I'm tired, I feel bad. When on such days I did as usual, it often killed the habit. Then I started doing it half-heartedly on those days. One squat instead of an hour-long workout. Run 10 meters instead of 5 km - the best solution. What is missing from the book "Atomic Habits" itself? At some point, I realized that even by following what is written in the book 100%, about 20% of habits fall off after a few months. I didn't understand why and started searching. I read about 10 more books on habits until I came across "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg. There is a wonderful passage about how a coach made his team win 99% of tournament games, but lose in the finals year after year. And only when the coach's child died, they were able to win after that. From this, the concept of belief is derived, a kind of emotional goal, understandable to a five-year-old child, why I am doing this habit. And I started trying. By that time, I had already been learning English through habits for almost half a year. And the habits were holding up amazingly with English. When I moved from Kyrgyzstan to Serbia, even a lot of changes and a two-week break did not affect my English habits. On the very first day I entered the apartment in Serbia, all habits fell into place. After a month, I instilled learning Serbian in the same way, but after 2 months they fell off, although I followed the rules of atomic habits perfectly. And here it became clear to me, my belief in English sounds like this: "I will not live in Russian-speaking countries in the future. The countries I like, English is 100% needed there. That is, I cannot survive without English." My belief in Serbian was like this: it's cool to try my method with Serbian. I lived in Serbia temporarily. I didn't need to naturalize, get a passport. 99% of the people I met spoke English amazingly. There was no obvious reason to learn English at that moment. After a year and a half, I found such a reason, but that's another story. Belief is why we do this habit. The main thing that the book "Atomic Habits" lacks. But habits didn't work for everything. There is a block of situations where they didn't work. After fifty of my own habits and over 300 client habits, I noticed a pattern. You cannot fix an existing psychological problem with a habit. You overeat and want to stop overeating with a habit, that won't work. You can have a habit of counting calories, you can have a habit of cooking deliciously, but not stop overeating. You also cannot fix sleep with a habit. Like, I need a habit of waking up early. I immediately say that this almost never happens, starting with the fact that the habit of waking up early is the habit of going to bed early, and we don't go to bed early. We most often do it because we don't have time to live our lives during the day and do it at night. We play, watch series, chat, walk. And if we give up for this, for the habit of waking up early, it will create even more problems, and no one will succeed. And second, you cannot achieve a complex and subtle achievement with a habit. For example, becoming popular on YouTube is a super complex skill consisting of about 15-20 elements. You first need to find and learn them. This will take 1-2 years in the best case. Then, sew a habit for each. Yes, you can make a habit of churning out videos every day. I did that. It will help a lot and push you among the 90% who will never make even five videos, but it won't fully close the task. Habits are an amazing tool that has fixed 70% of my lifelong problems, which I thought were just how things should be. Now, when people ask me: "How do you do something for two years without even seeing results?" I say, through habits. And after another month of these two years, the habit shoots up and gives a cumulative effect for these 2 years and 1 month. I described what a cool and productive life consists of in my TG channel. Come over. Bye.