The biggest habit building mistake

If you have an addiction that brings you great shame, or just a nasty, nasty bad habit that you for some reason can't stop doing, or even if you have something that is a good thing that you want to start doing—maybe it's going to the gym. Maybe you want to be the type of person who goes to the gym, but you just can't bring yourself to do it. Maybe you have done it successfully a couple days in a row, usually during the New Year, but something always happens.

You do the new good thing for a little bit, or you stop doing the bad thing for a little bit, but a couple days in you start to feel it. It's like a mounting pressure, and all of a sudden you have one bad day—a day where maybe you were a little bit too lazy to go to the gym, or maybe you were a little bit too weak in the willpower department to not do the bad thing that you're avoiding. It feels like the whole thing comes crashing down. You lament. It's like the House of Cards finally came crumbling down, and you binge yourself to death on the thing you are trying to avoid, or the old lifestyle that you were trying to get away from.

If this has been your story with sticking to a new habit change or trying to change your life in any meaningful way, then there's a very good chance that you've been falling for the myth of vertical progress. What is the myth of vertical progress? I don't know if it's a result of Internet self-improvement culture or recent studies in habit formation—psychological something or other—but everybody seems to have this idea that if they just make it to a certain amount of days, then everything will make sense. They fetishize 21 days or 30 days or 90 days or 365 days. They think to themselves, "Damn me in this piece of mode right now! If I could only make it to 90 days, then everything would make sense."

90 day me is legit! He just feels better about himself, he lives a better life, he's not bothered by trivial things, because he's sort of gigachad viewing lifestyle change. Like this is viewing progress as a vertical thing. You know, you stack day two on top of day one, day three on top of day two, and then when the stack of days gets big enough, then your life changes. And the wild thing is almost everyone thinks this way. For some reason we think in terms of streaks, but the issue is that no habit that you currently have was ever built like this.

Even if you thought you were building your habit that way, the reality of this situation is that every single successful day that you had, you were building progress; you were strengthening the muscle of that new lifestyle. So many of us believe that in order to change our entire lives, all we need to do is hit a certain amount of days, and then everything will make sense. It's like nothing really matters up until that point, but then we hit that magical number and our lives change forever.

And even if you don't believe that sort of dramatic narrative, there's still a subconscious understanding that, "Oh, if I just hit this amount of days, then things will become easier." What was once unnatural will feel natural. You know, it'll officially be locked in as a habit, and then I don't need to try very hard anymore; it's just automatic. But the problem is, not only is this type of thinking psychologically inaccurate, but it also adds so much pressure to hit this magical day.

We're approaching lifestyle change as if it's a Jenga Tower. You know, you stack days on top of days on top of days, and eventually at the top you hit your goal. But the problem with the Jenga Tower is that with each block you add, it becomes more unstable. So this pressure of messing up becomes bigger and bigger and bigger the more days you have under your belt.

When you think like this, it almost always feels as if though if you make it really far—like halfway, say your goal is 90 days and you make it 45 days—if you mess up after 45 days, it's almost like the floodgates are open. You're like, "Oh, I knew I couldn't do it!" And then all of a sudden you binge into the old behavior, and you figure maybe three years from now you're gonna try again.

But the thing is, progress is not vertical; it's never been vertical. We're not building a tower; we're building a road—a road that we're planning on taking for the rest of our lives, a road that we do take with each day that we partake in that new activity. Because every single habit that you have is just a road that leads you to a desired destination. Even your bad habits, you do them because you get something out of it. You know, they give you some sort of feeling that you want to feel.

The problem is that over time, as we walk a certain road we learn that this road is actually pretty treacherous. You know, it hurts us in the long run. Maybe it's infested with wolves, maybe there are slopes that make you slip and muddy your clothes, maybe it's a super inefficient route, and you're traveling and exhausting yourself way longer than you need to in order to get your desired outcome. Whatever the case is, not all roads are created equal.

Sometimes we establish roads very early in our lives that lead us to this destination that we want, but we learn as we get older that there are way more efficient and healthier routes to get to that result. And this road that we established, that we laid all these bricks on and created this highway on, no longer serves us. The reward it proposes is no longer worth the injury we inflict upon ourselves by taking this road.

So we decide through our conscious effort to start constructing a new road. And a lot of the time, taking this new road to this same destination that we want—a road that is less treacherous, a road that won't hurt us as much. It'll take some work, because a lot of the time, you know, day one, day two, day three—we're all motivated to sort of bushwhack and create this new road through the weeds.

But in the long run, we know that this new road is going to be way better, way more efficient, and just a road that we want to walk. And every single day that we opt for this new road instead of the old one, the old one is starting to grow over. You know, some weeds are starting to take effect; there's some overgrowth starting to develop. And every single day that we spend working on this new road, it becomes more comfortable and more likely that we use this road in the future because we are telling our brain that yes, this road leads to what we want.

So this new lifestyle that you've been working on, that you occasionally try every January 1st, it's still there! It's always been there, but the degree to which it's developed is solely based on how much you've been using it. And just because you have a bad day and you understandably choose the old road one day, it doesn't mean that that road, that new road you're trying to build doesn't exist anymore.

Maybe you were tired, maybe you didn't want to bushwhack that day. I get it! The old road probably looks very tempting. Maybe you forgot why you were building the new road, but just because you picked the old road one day doesn't mean all of your progress is lost on the new road you're building. It's not! And it feels so much better and more encouraging to know that the longer that you spend developing the new road—planting bricks in solid ground day after day—that old road is starting to get overgrown.

The more time you spend on this new road through conscious effort, the easier this road becomes to walk, not harder. There is no mounting pressure. So if you mess up after one day and you want to burn the whole thing down, that's entirely up to you. You can go back and start removing bricks on this new road, brick by brick. But just know that it will be through conscious effort, because it doesn't just explode automatically.

You can choose to abandon your new building project and let the weeds grow over so that the next time that you try it again, you have to bushwhack right from the start again. But it will reveal a road that was already there that you placed through effort, so it'll be just that much easier to start up on that new road again.

So hopefully this is a profoundly encouraging thought. Changing your entire life has never been about, "Okay, let's see how far we can go with this!" And if I have one bad day, "Well, it was worth a shot! Guess we'll try again three years from now." It's like, no! We're in the business of developing new defaults—like deep grooves to sink into—day by day. We place a new brick, we whack a new weed until this road is a far more comfortable road to travel to get what we want.

And then eventually, by using this new road more and more and more, the old road will start to get consumed by overgrowth. It will become a road that just feels very questionable. You know, it's like, "Oh, why would we choose that road when this road is so much better that we've built?" But it just takes some time to get there. Relinquish yourself of the pressure of vertical progress; it doesn't exist. Stop chasing these arbitrary numbers that have absolutely no resemblance to living your life day by day, decision by decision.

Try to find ways to make building this new road as easy and as efficient as possible. Remind yourself constantly of why you're building this new road, and try to help yourself develop it so that it's one that you prefer taking ten times out of ten. Let the old road die away and become infested with parasites. I don't know what that was; that was kind of stupid.

Let's build some roads! And I want you guys to download the audiobook "Atomic Habits" by James Clear using today's video sponsor, Audible. I know you've heard this title and this author so many times, but there is a reason for it—it's an endlessly re-readable book, and it reminds you that every single time you do a new lifestyle thing that you want to do, it makes it more likely that you do that thing in the future, not less likely. That doesn't make any sense!

So if you already have Audible, download that audiobook. It is worth it. And if you don't have Audible and you don't know what that is, Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audiobooks all in one place. Every single month, they send you one credit which you can spend on any audiobook of your choice, regardless of cost, and you get to keep that audiobook forever. If you ever cancel your subscription, you still keep your entire library of audiobooks.

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