Keystone Habits: simple kernel for life

For the last few years, I spent a lot of my mental bandwidth on figuring out how to be happy. In the beginning, I wasn’t very successful in my search. I turned towards self help books, started reading ‘7 habits of highly effective teens’, books by Norman Vincent Peale and all sorts of crazy stuff. The problem with self help books is that they have

lots of information

no backup from science

Information overload

When you desperately want your life to take a happy turn, you want simple actionable advice. A small step which would take you in the right direction. most of the self help books fail in this regard. They can’t stop talking. They have too much info. They want you do be punctual, honest, empathetic and all kinds of other stuff. This is not actionable advice. I was almost always overwhelmed by the information provided by these books. Maybe it’s the problem with the medium. Even if your advice can be summarised into a blog post of 700 words, you need to fill it up with 200-300 pages worth of related material for it to be sold as a book

no backup from science

The self help authors rarely back up their advice with research. They play the role of soothsayers. Predicting you to be happy if you do this and if you do that. What’s the proof? nothing.

In those days, I wasn’t as clear headed as I am now. It took me a long time to get out of that self-help book buying spiral.

After self-help, I started reading about productivity hacks. I constantly read ‘lifehacker’. Checking it every half an hour. Installing 20 different android apps, trying them out, fitting it into my workflow, so that I can save a couple of seconds. I found out similar sites like ‘lifehacker’ and started following them. This didn’t last long. The articles on these sites increasingly felt like ‘fast food’. Literary equivalent of french fries. What I needed were veggies. green veggies. I broke down one day and blocked ‘lifehacker’ on my computer.

After that I started reading about ‘minimalism’. I read ‘zenhabits’, ‘theminimalists’ and other such sites. I kept my room clean, discarded all unnecessary items. I even made a wallet out of paper. In hindsight, there was nothing wrong with this ‘minimalism’ phase. I just lost interest after a few months.

I continued searching like this. Searching for some epiphany, something that will give me direction, that will hit me like a ton of bricks and jolt me awake from this uncertainty.

While exploring my consciousness one day, I had this thought that the amount of happiness you experience in life depends on your habits. not goals. I had this brilliant clarity that if I wanted to be happy, then I should focus more on my habits, think more about them. I think I got this insight mainly because of a waitbutwhy article. In that article, the author says that if you want to be happy, focus on things that make you happy on a daily basis. Don’t base your happiness on reaching some goal, because your achievement will lose its charm and you will get used to it.

On an otherwise uneventful day, while I was browsing the internet, I stumbled upon the concept of ‘keystone habits’. Go ahead and click that link. That blog is one great find. Back to keystone habits, A set of 5 habits which when acquired help you realize other good habits unconsciously. In other words, A set of 5 habits which guarantee you happiness. BAM. That was the epiphany I had been waiting for.

What’s the big deal?

These habits are special because they help you acquire other good habits(which are not in the list, like ‘getting enough sleep’). It’s not even help, once you acquire these habits the others start forming without you even noticing. It’s like you are on auto pilot, acquiring new habits and reaching new levels of happiness.

What are they?

here is the list of keystone habits in no particular order

journal (morning pages)

meditation

exercise

diet (eat healthy)

budgeting (make a budget and follow it)

I do journaling in the form of ‘morning pages’. I write 750 words everyday in the morning with no backspace i.e., no editing. Just do some reflection. the ‘morning pages’ habit is easy to acquire compared to other habits in the list. eating healthy is complex if you want to count your calories and all, but following a few good heuristics like ‘less fast food’ will get you far. So, there you have it. The backbone for your existence, for your good life.

The most important part of the puzzle fell into place. Now we need help in forming habits. Anyone trying to develop a gym habit will tell you how hard it is. The key here is to start small. Don’t go for a complete overhaul of your lifestyle. If you want to start meditating, just do it for 5 minutes daily. start small. Don’t worry about the size of your task. Don’t think that 5 minutes of meditation is nothing and you should do more. Be patient. These small tasks will add up over time. It’s like filling a bucket in a small stream. The progress maybe slow, but given enough time you will have lots of water.

I can’t overstate the importance of this discovery in my life. These 5 habits can act as a kernel around which you build your happy life