As we grow, the responsibility of creating new habits starts to become ours. We start being more independent and as such more in charge of what we do and how we do it.

This is not a guide that promises you’ll be able to create any habit you please, more than that, these are just my thoughts on the subject and some things that have worked for me so far. If we’re realistic what works for some may not work for others, but it could provide some perspective or some ideas.

One of the problems I faced when trying to make new habits was that I wasn’t playing the long game, I would try going a full 180 degrees in one day and then be frustrated when I couldn’t keep it up. Here’s the thing though, a habit is something that implies repetition. Imagine if instead of trying to go 180 degrees in one day you tried 2 degrees. Yes it’ll take long-ish, but what’s better, taking a long time to build a habit or trying to build it in a couple of days and fail?

“Rome wasn’t build in a day” — Someone

I think the two biggest problems with creating new habits are “lack of time” and “it’s too hard”. If you take the aforementioned approach these problems aren’t really that big. Let’s put a concrete example.

Say you’re not much of a reader but you want to start reading. Instead of saying “I’m going to read x amount of books this year”, you can say “I’m going to read 10 pages every day”. Reading 10 pages a day is neither difficult nor does it take too much time. And this becomes even easier if we set a time for it. For example: I’ll read 10 pages everyday before going to sleep.

With such little amount of work over a prolonged period of time you can achieve something big. By reading 10 pages daily you can read a 300 page book in a month. 15 minutes every day will equal a book in a month.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts on this, what about you? Do you have any tips on creating habits? Was this the dumbest thing you’ve read in a while? Let me know :)

-Marcos

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