Developing Good Habits to Reach Your Goals – Book Recommendations

Habits can potentially be our best friends. Of course, we all have friends that will either push us to get things done or encourage us to relax and binge-watch the latest Netflix series with them when we have a project due within the next 48 hours. We love them both, but it’s important to distinguish when to hang out with one and when to pay more attention to the other.  That’s where developing good habits become super important.

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Know what it is that you want to do and WHY you want to accomplish it!

Have you ever given yourself a New Year’s Resolution then forgot about it within a month (my “goal” to drink more water each day for a year ended maybe two weeks in after finally drinking a Vanilla Coke). It’s not enough to just say that we want to do something. We have to have a purpose for wanting to do it. We need a long-term drive to push us through those short-term discouragements. Our old habits will try to tell us it’s not working out. Developing good habits will encourage us to figure out how to make it work. 

Set SMART goals and developing good habits around them!

Many of us may have heard this term before, but it’s okay if this is your first time seeing this. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable/Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound.

Specific

Try not to be general with your goal and say “I’ll drink more water” or “I’ll work out more”. Technically, just drinking a tiny cup full of water or walking to the donuts shop up the street could check these items off our “I did it!” list. Write out your goals where they are clear and precise.  

For example, “I’ll drink more water” might become, “Whenever I wake up, I will drink at least 8 ounces of water before I get dressed for work.” or “I’ll work out more” becomes, “every night before I take a shower or go to bed, I will do ten minutes of yoga.” Be specific of what you want to do in order to initiate the habit of actually doing what needs to be done. 

Measurable

We need to be able to track our progress. In the beginning, it’s not going to look like we’ve made that much of a change. As humans, we like immediate and accurate results. If we order fast food, we expect it to be delivered, well, fast. If our GPS says we’ll get somewhere in 20 minutes, we are watching the clock if not racing it. Unfortunately, our habits and the goals connected to them will not happen instantaneously. It’ll be a slow-moving effect, so much so that we may feel like we’ve made no progress at all. That’s why making a goal measurable is important. Small progress is still progress!

Attainable / Achievable

The goal needs to be challenging, but just a little farther out from a comfortable reach. If you’ve never played chess a day in your life, then it probably wouldn’t be realistic to say that your goal is to compete in the top rankings of the International Chess Tournament next month. That skill-set might take years to master. However, you can set a realistic yet challenging goal of learning the purpose of each piece and participating in a beginner or intermediate game by the end of the month. Work up from there. 

Relevant

Be honest with yourself. There’s a saying that goes “knowledge is power”. This is partially true. The more accurate statement is “knowledge is potential power” meaning that the knowledge is only useful if we actually…you know…use it!

I once spent two weeks watching tutorials on Lynda (now called LinkedIn Learning) because I was interested in the User Experience Learning Path that was recommended to me. Was it packed full of useful information? Heck yeah! Did I use any of the information immediately? Not at all. Do I remember anything from the tutorial? Barely. I watched it over three years ago and have yet to apply any of it into my own projects.

The information itself was valuable, but because I had no use of it at the moment and have forgotten what I’ve learned since then, the time learning it was wasted. Choose wisely what is relevant to learn now in order to reach your immediate goals. 

Time-Bound

Have you ever had a project or paper assigned, forgot about it, then realized that the due date was that week? Did you not crank that assignment out as if your life depended on it? Deadlines have the power to make us do incredible things in an established amount of time. If we’re given a month to do it, then guess what…it’ll take a month to do it. But if we’re given a week to do it, it magically gets done in a week!  

Give yourself deadlines and do not compromise them with yourself unless absolutely necessary! “I forgot” does not count! Since I decided to become a blogger, my task is to release a new blog every week, three minimum each month but only if I released other material such as YouTube vlogs to compensate for content creation.  My blog “Things to Consider Before Pursuing a Career Opportunity” was written half-haphazardly in a day and edited in two because I panicked for procrastinating to write for the first whole week of April. Time-bound goals will help keep you on track.

Start small.

From James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he explains that small changes can lead to bigger results, but beginning with big changes can tire out and discourage us. As I mentioned earlier with my failed dedication to water, of all things…I made an extreme change to my sugar habit to where when I finally caved to my sugar craving, I had no motivation to go back to bland water. Then I tried a different method: I traded a few of my sodas (not all like last time) with sparkly water.

By starting with a smaller, more tolerable change, it helped me to control and alter my bad habits.

Complimenting this, The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy goes more in-depth in explaining how small changes in our daily lives can lead to massive results. One of my favorite stories referenced in this book is the effect of the compounding penny. It’s fairly simple to calculate on a sheet of paper to see the results for yourself, but the theory is for a penny to double its worth each day for thirty days. By day two, it’s worth $0.02, day five it’s worth $0.16, day ten it’s worth $5.12, and so on. The results of the penny’s compounding effect are miniature in the beginning, almost unnoticeable if you graph it out, but with patience that single penny can grow to be worth over five million dollars by the thirty-day mark! 

This is a compressed example of how something small can grow into something big. It may take months, or even years to see results in our own lives. The outcome, however, can be phenomenal in the long run! Whether it’s becoming fluent in a new language by learning a new word a day or by mastering a new skill by just starting with a simple hobby today, just start small!

Apply this exercise to anything to build beneficial habits. If you want to read more, just do a page or two a day and work up to a full chapter. Want to exercise more? Do a small lap around your house or apartment first, then increase the distance over time. If you want to start writing stories, start off with one sentence of topics that interest you (this helps me with blog ideas). Start small, and the results will grow over time. 

Understand the power of habits.

I mentioned earlier how our habits can be our best friends, but they can also become our worst enemies if we lose control of them. For example, it’s not exactly dangerous to have a habit of getting a cheap lottery ticket every Saturday when we stop to get gas. We’ll win some; we’ll lose some. Oh well. It is dangerous to have a habit of stocking up on lottery tickets every day because we feel like the next one will be “the one” to make up for the others. 

In order to take advantage of the impacts that developing good habits can have on us, I believe that it’s important to understand the psychological power that habits. Either good or bad, it’s simple to develop these habits without us even realizing it. For this, I recommend The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. When we dive deep into understanding why we do certain things, we give ourselves the power to overcome bad habits. We can then trade them for better ones over time. 

Book Recommendation Summary

Using the Audible app during my travels, I do my best to listen to as many books as I can. For the topic of habits, these three have been the most impactful to me (that I’ve read so far) and are the ones that motivated me to write this blog. You can obtain your own copy in the links below!