Building habits that stick

You know the times where I say that I'm a huge self-improvement junkie? I'm certainly not joking. I've read, watched, listened to hundreds of stuff - attended seminars, questioned experts, etc - so you can rest assured that I know what I'm talking about.

The very first principle anybody who tries self-improvement should be this: Consistency. It's obvious and common-sense. If you want something to stick with you, you do it repeatedly until the effort to perform it becomes nullified and effortless. 

Basically, you proceed from...

1. Unconscious incompetency to...
2. Conscious incompetency to...
3. Conscious competency to...
4. Unconscious competency

By the time you reach unconscious competency, if it's a physical activity, your brain would have minimized all the excessive movements you take to perform something and made it optimal and so effortless it's like reciting your ABCs.

Let me prove my point... You know your ABCs, don't you? Now recite your ABCs in reverse - can you do it? Well, not now, since your brain has already optimized the rhyme and song within your head as a forward-moving algorithm.

But let me add to the case of Consistency a few more facts:

1. It takes close to 60 days to form a habit - and you still need to maintain that habit until it becomes subconscious and routined.
2. The higher the variability of reward, the harder it is to unlearn your habit.
3. Form a habit like a statue - slowly build upon it and condition more stimuli to previously neutral stimuli. This is known as the Japanese principle: Kaizen. So for example, day 1, you sweep one tile of the floor. Day 2, you sweep the floor 1 more tile than the previous day, etc.

This is also what a lot of trending articles call Deliberate Practice, a term coined by a psychology professor at Florida State University. Experts break down a task they wish to master and slowly master components of it, often paired with immediate feedback. Once mastered, they test higher and higher grounds until the challenge simmers away.

So what I normally do when I want to learn a skill is to immediately break down what I need to master into components. From these components, I convert them into actionable goals. From these actionable goals, I break them down into actionable milestones within these goals. Then I formulate steps I can take to master them.

To me, it's like a game. For example... Currently, I meditate, do postural exercises, practice martial arts, learn cooking, practice programming, do voice training, workout, etc all in one day. I do vary them around, but it's all plotted into my timetable.

I think a really great mindset to have is this: To grow, you need today to be better than yesterday. If it's worse or the same as yesterday, you're stagnating. Deviating a small degree now can turn it into a huge degree change from the direction that you're heading towards.

Whether you want to be a better parent, a better student, a better employee/boss, a better person as a whole, a better business man or whatever... I think it has to start from this growth mentality.

Just a thought...