Do you struggle to implement something new in your life?
I do. Something as easy as a short daily dedicated study time, or keeping a journal. Everything new requires much more extra effort than initially planned.
There’s no other way than taking it step by step and accept the slowness of it all. It’s best to cherish the small accomplishments and praise yourself like you praise a baby for shoveling its first pile of freakin’ sand.
“What new things have you tried to put in place in your life these days?”, I wrote down this morning. My mind slightly wandered: For who am I writing anyways? Well, for myself… and for the Google algorithm. Why? Because it makes me feel good to know I’m capable of producing besides merely consuming. How long can I keep up? As long as I can keep up my discipline. What’s the goal? – to avoid Alzheimer’s. Alright, that’s cleared.
A business-educator, Josh Kaufman, once showed in a TED Talk how it only takes 20 full focused hours to learn any new skill you want – at least reaching a reasonable level. In the talk, he shows how he learned to play the Ukulele in 20 hours and performs a magical compilation of familiar songs all using a few chords on his instrument. He received a wild applause and girls are screaming. Sounds awesome right? And easy too right? 20 hours. That’s the amount of hours most people spend on their phones scrolling through entirely useless soul destroying “social” (uh-um) feeds each week. How about we skip being so mega “social” for a week? Yeah! It sounds easy, and it is in fact simple, but putting it to practice is unfortunately still painfully hard. For a whole other reason though.
Try it out yourself. Take anything you want to learn, follow the following steps suggested by mister Kaufman, and make sure to keep it as your habit for only 1 month – EVERY DAY.
Here’s how it goes:
1) Deconstruct the skill.
Make it super specific of what you want to do, set your goal.
2) Learn enough to self-correct or “self-edit”.
Get better at noticing your mistakes and subsequent correcting.
3) And here’s the best part. Use the selective focus for 45 minutes.
It means pay full attention to what you are learning for 1 academic hour.
Why is the last part the best part? Well, test how many days in a row can you do that? 45 minutes, full focus. Each day. 1 specific (new) task. Try it. Stop reading this blog. Go and try. Read further after trying. See you in a not too distant future.
Well? What did you discover trying to be disciplined? I bet it had to do something with your sense of focus. Because it also takes focus to practice discipline. You probably learned that you need to be mindful to notice when your new habit-learning starts to derail, and you slowly divert back to your old path of comfort. You lost focus, and with it you lost discipline. So losing focus means giving up. Like an infant gives up when it cries itself to sleep.
Even if you “really want” your new habit to have a place in your life and you are running well for a week, you are still bound to fall off. There’s a looming day when you lose just a bit of that mysterious power – inspiration or motivation – to carry on. So, you skip a day; perhaps another one. That’s not a bit deal, right?
Even if you “really want” your new habit to have a place in your life and you are running well for a week, you are still bound to fall off. There’s a looming day when you lose just a bit of that mysterious power – inspiration or motivation – to carry on. So, you skip a day; perhaps another one. That’s not a bit deal, right? Well, in reality you just let the good old well-carved habit to slide through – the habit of comfort.
To sum it up, what it takes to form a new healthy habit is discipline and focus, and not a steady stream of inspiration and sparks of motivation that are purely emotional factors. And as we know, emotions come and go, like spiraling thoughts. You cannot rely on emotions, but you can rely on your skills.
“It’s not about inspiration but Disciplinary Rituals and focus practice”
(Cal Newport -Deep Work).
Discipline and focus are skills to be learned – they go hand in hand and they become a superpower when you want to pick up new habits in your life.
