Did you make any New Year’s resolutions this year?
No matter your answer, you know how a lot of resolutions go. You create a list of goals, make a few promises and start doing things with the familiar January enthusiasm. However, a few days or weeks in, promises break, excitement fades and you’re back to square one. What goes wrong?
We all crave success in some form, but achieving and sustaining that success doesn’t come from sporadic efforts. It takes consistent, year-round success habits to drive real progress.
But here’s the catch: Building new habits is tricky.
So what are success habits and why are they important? And how can you develop and sustain them? Keep reading to learn more!
What Are Habits and Why Do They Matter?
Understanding how habits work is crucial for developing the good ones that support your progress. So let’s briefly discuss what habits are and how they’re formed.
Habits Defined
A habit is something you do regularly. Whether you notice them or not, habits drive your everyday actions. They are the reason you stay in bed long after waking up, whether you brush your teeth with your right or left hand, how you hold your phone with one hand while sipping black coffee with the other or whether you bite your nails or binge-eat when stressed.
The Process Of Habit Formation
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg describes habit formation as a three-step process:
- Cue: A trigger prompts you to take action.
- Routine: You perform the action.
- Reward: You get a physical, mental or emotional benefit from the action.
If the reward is valuable, your mind tells you to repeat the action the next time you meet the cue. Over time, with constant repetition, these three steps become a loop and form a habit.
For example, say you come across an interesting sentence or paragraph while reading a book (cue), and you highlight it and take notes (routine). This action helps you retain the information better (reward), so you do it again next time. Eventually, you may form the habit of taking notes while reading.
Why Habits Matter
Good habits don’t just benefit you in the moment. They shape your behaviors and improve the quality of your days, which stack up to become weeks, months and even years, affecting every aspect of your life. And that’s exactly why they matter.
Why Habits Are Important For Success
Think of all the positive habits you have. It can be a stable sleep schedule, waking up early, going for morning walks, hitting the gym on most days or journaling before going to bed.
Guess what? You might already have some of the habits of successful people—and it’s no coincidence.
- Oprah Winfrey’s morning routine often includes exercise, meditation and reading.
- Bill Gates reads extensively and shares his recommendations on his website.
- Jeff Bezos sleeps for eight hours every night to improve his thoughts, energy and mood.
The lesson here can be well summarized by this quote from philosopher Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Indeed, our habits make us who we are, and that’s exactly why it’s important to develop good habits for success and growth—personal, professional and beyond.
How To Develop Good Habits For Success
Building positive habits—or breaking negative ones—can feel like pushing a heavy object over a rough surface, which is difficult when the friction and inertia of your existing habits strongly resist that change. However, you can ease this process by following some simple steps:
Step 1: Start With Pebbles, Not Mountains
You don’t need to move a mountain in the first attempt; start moving pebbles first. Want to start running? Walk 100 steps today. Want to quit smoking? Smoke one less cigarette a day. Want to start meditating? Start with two minutes instead of 10. Make it so easy you can’t fail!
Step 2: Use Triggers
Since missing new habits is easy, create triggers that remind you to stay on track. Set alarms, stick notes on the wall or make to-do lists. You can also use habit-tracking apps like Loop Habit Tracker, Habitica or Habitify to maintain your streak.
Step 3: Track Your Progress
Seeing yourself in action is a great way to stay motivated. You can use habit-tracking apps for this, too, but manual methods like marking your calendar, taking a photo or video to document your progress or journaling have a similar impact.
Step 4: Reward Yourself
Reward is a crucial step in the habit loop. So give yourself little treats when you maintain a new habit streak for a week, 15 days or a month. It can be anything from a cup of coffee or a movie to a new dress or a daylong holiday. These rewards reinforce your commitment and keep you going.
Proven Habit-Building Techniques
Knowing how to form habits is one thing, but the real challenge is following through. Thankfully, though, some proven habit-building techniques can help you build good habits for success:
Atomic Habits Approach
In his bestselling book Atomic Habits, author James Clear shares the 1% improvement rule. The rule explains how even minuscule, barely noticeable improvements can lead to dramatic outcomes in the long run.
For example, suppose you start doing five pushups every day. Even if you increase the reps by just one daily pushup every week, you can hit over 50 pushups per set by year’s end.
Darren Hardy aptly summed up this effect in his book The Compound Effect: “It’s not the big things that add up in the end; it’s the hundreds, thousands, or millions of little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.”
Habit Stacking
Your habits are like books on your shelf. Just like stacking a new book on top of existing ones saves space, habit stacking—the practice of pairing new habits with existing ones—saves time and effort.
Here are some examples of habit stacking:
- Taking a short walk after dinner
- Listening to podcasts or audiobooks while preparing breakfast
- Reading a book during your commute
- Drinking a glass of water right after waking up (or right before bed)
- Practicing French on Duolingo during lunch break
In each example, the second action is a well-established habit that serves as a cue for the first action. Stacking new habits this way makes it easier to maintain the new habit.
Set SMART Goals
The clearer your goals, the more likely you are to achieve them. The SMART framework ensures this by making your goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant and
- Time-bound
For example, instead of a vague goal like, “I want to lose weight,” a SMART goal can be: “I want to lose 10 pounds in two months by jogging for 30 minutes every day, avoiding oily and high-calorie foods and eating more fruits, vegetables and whole grains.”
By setting SMART goals, you directly link your vision to your habits, making it clear why they matter.
Embrace Failure
No matter what you do, you will likely stray off a habit at some point. You might skip the gym on a Thursday, snooze your alarm and wake up late, forget to create a to-do list for the next day or feel too sick to care about that evening walk.
But here is the good news. Building habits is not about maintaining a scarless streak. What truly matters is to embrace such little failures, forgive yourself and get back on track as soon as possible. As James Clear writes, “You just need to be consistent, not perfect.”
How Simple Habits Lead To Long-Term Success
While creating positive habits is the first part of achieving your goals, it’s only when your habits align with your beliefs and identity that you truly sustain success. And it all starts with a key question: Who do you want to be?
To find your answer, try connecting your goals with yourself. For example:
- If you want to start running, your answer can be, “I want to become a runner.”
- If you want to read more books, you can say, “I want to become a reader.”
This simple mindset shift bases your habits on your ideal identity. Once you start believing in this identity, you are set for long-term success.
But it doesn’t end there. Here are some other ways to stay motivated in the long run:
- Surround yourself with people who share your goals. Make them your accountability partners who remind you of your beliefs just by their presence.
- Join online and offline communities to have a support system and support others too.
In the end, sustainable success boils down to whether your habits are in sync with your idea of yourself. So, make sure to keep reflecting on your values and beliefs and adjust as they change.
Make Your Goals A Reality With Success Habits
Your habits are a collective reflection of who you are. Creating positive habits for success is as much about an inner transformation as about achieving your goals. So, as you transform yourself, remember that transformation begins with a single change, which can be as minimal as walking 100 steps a day.
Start small, take little steps and slowly (yet continually) improve as you move forward. Before you know it, you will be a completely different person altogether—and successful.
Photo by LaylaBird/iStock.com
