Falling in Love With Good Habits
Throughout my entire life, I’ve always tried to do my best. From an early age, I grew into playing sports and tennis specifically, so I was a naturally competitive kid.
I used to practice it four, six, sometimes eight hours a day at some point. It was gruesome. But it was also when I was the happiest. I didn’t win so much (I lost a lot more), but I truly enjoyed my time doing it.
As I grew older and started to leave tennis behind, I began to look into productivity hacks to find time to work with the many new things I was falling in love with back then.
And the productivity fangirling was real.
I started using the best tools, following the gurus, and even making up crazy routines that went beyond my standard back then. But eventually, I saw that I wasn’t as happy, even with efficient multitasking. And that was because I wasn’t entirely interested in the things I was doing.
So I thought back to one of my coaches’ best advice:
Find your addiction, then encourage it.
He wasn’t talking about harmful addictions. Instead, he spoke of passion and falling in love with what you do.
I’ve then started to look into how you master yourself, and without a doubt, looking inwards became my best productivity hack.
Since then, I’ve:
- Read at least 30 books a year;
- Overcame my fear of public speaking;
- And became much more aware of my eating habits.
But how can you do this?
Reverse-Engineer Yourself
I’ve used my relationship with addiction to leverage my strengths. Achieving better results were just an additional benefit that came with the process of loving that struggle.
I didn’t necessarily need to motivate myself to get out of bed or to read another book page, or even to achieve a work goal.
Exercising is the best example of this. One of the most dominant athletes of all time and crowned four times Crossfit Champion, Mat Fraser, is exceptionally passionate about self-improvement. But even more importantly, he views habit as the way to excellency.
The fittest people in the world are not the ones that hate doing what they are doing. They are all in remarkably great shape because they train every single day and are entirely in love with their process. Besides, the chances of doing something so repetitively and be successful to the rate they are, are slim to none.
Most often, the people that are failing at getting into shape despise exercising. That is not to say that you can’t get in shape if you don’t like it. But the difference is tremendous, and more often than not, the results come even quicker.
The first step to improvement is enjoying the long process of doing something and making that a passion of yours.
The amount of dopamine I got from my habits became the same as when I started binging a new Netflix show I liked.
So the tradeoff was easy.
And for the things I wasn’t always in love with, I found a way to turn that feeling into passionate addiction and lead myself toward a path of gratitude.
Again, the need to do something wasn’t always there. But I genuinely created such a strong sense of love for these new habits that doing them became the best part of my day. I realized that if I could make it an addiction, a ritual, or a tradition in the first place, I would be satisfied. The results would come naturally.
The more you apply and create a relationship with good habits (and ones that lead toward the goal you envision), the more it becomes an addiction.
Then, as you encourage that addiction, you start to see the difference in yourself.
The more wood you throw at a fire, the stronger it burns.
You don’t have to be addicted to everything, but if you encourage yourself to love something specific, you automatically start to see better results than if you didn’t care for it in the first place.
A part of me always thought of myself as a creator, even if I haven’t always been one. But the passion for creating something has always been there. So I started writing.
If you want to reach your goals in a less stressful and more effective way, try flipping the table on the situation. Make the things you want to improve at a passion through habit, even if you hate them right now. That passion will eventually become the avenue to the results you are aiming for.
No matter how many hours you work every day, the numbers tell us the truth.
Your industry heroes, the best athletes, and even your admired bosses most likely love doing what they do on an everyday basis. And not every one of them started out feeling like that.
Thanks for reading! What do you think? Please let me know here or at gvdumit@gmail.com
