Such wisdom has inspired me to form such good habits as praying, reading, telling the truth, stretching with rollers, meditating on God's Word and going for one-hour walks. (Yes, even praying and telling the truth are habit forming.)
The wisdom has also inspired me to break bad habits like procrastination, overeating and constantly checking social media. But there is one bad habit I am yet to conquer: oversleeping!
I usually rise at around 6:40 a.m. which to me is oversleeping since my preferred waking-up time is 5:30 a.m. Try as might, I have for a long time been unable to rise consistently at 5:30 a.m.
Perhaps it is that desire to form a good habit of rising early everyday that compelled me to buy James Clear's Atomic Habits, a book about easy and proven methods of building good habits and breaking bad ones.
At first, Atomic Habits sounded like a great book as I read an introductory story about how James Clear was accidentally hit in the head with a bat while playing baseball during his high school years. That accident landed him in hospital where he underwent surgery. He recovered fully from the surgery and went on to excel in academics and baseball at the university thanks to the good habits he formed.
After reading that riveting story, the book got progressively boring as James explained the fundamentals of building good habits using facts drawn from scientific experiments and other sources. He laced his explanations with graphs and diagrams, not quite what I like.
All the same, I was able to glean a few valuable insights from the book. Chief among the insights is how tiny changes done over a long period of time end up making a big difference. This equation illustrates that insight:
1% better every day for one year 1.01365=37.78Another insight I gleaned from the book is that habits do not restrict freedom; they create it. If, for instance, we do not have good health habits, we will always be short on energy. And if we do not have good financial habits, we will always be struggling for the next dollar.
James said in the book that the key to mastering a good habit is through repetition, not perfection. To build a habit, we need to practice it. That reminded me of an aphorism that says "repetition is the mother of skill".
He went on to say that a habit needs to be enjoyable for it to last. So he advised us to find a way to make our habits exciting. If, for example, we want to be avid readers, we should read what fascinates us. I couldn't agree with him more on that.
My beloved reader, I exhort you to also kick out bad habits and form good ones like rising early, reading avidly, eating moderately and exercising regularly. Man is, after all, a creature of habit. We become what we practice.
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RECOMMENDATION: If you've enjoyed the above story on developing good habits, you might also enjoy another one on "Developing Good Sleeping Habits" which I wrote more than two years ago. Just click on that link in blue to dive straight into the story.
