Mind the Habit

What’s the One Thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Gary Keller & Jay Papasan

This is what in The One Thing book is called the FOCUSING QUESTION.

This question is a prompt to GO SMALL, really small, because it helps you to identify your one thing in any situation!

This one thing could be a tiny change, that gives you a small win.

But small wins have the power to trigger a chain reaction, which effect can be so BIG and disproportionate compared to the accomplishment of the small win itself, to the extent of being life-changing.

By building a good habit, you create the situation that helps the formation of other new good habits.

When I built the habit of morning meditation, I personally experience a halo effect, thanks to which I started improving my overall health with exercise, better hydration and diet, sleep routine, mindfulness, breath work, cold exposure, journaling, gratefulness, less worries and stress….

My interest in spirituality, health and longevity, and many other things just grew spontaneously. It’s been a natural consequence of the first habit which, to the contrary, I did intentionally build.

Small habits accumulate to create transformative outcomes.

In the previous article, “The Breakthrough”, I showed you the 411 with my end of the year achievements. Here is the picture of my 66-day meditation challenge, which is going to show you how small I started to get to those results… 1 minute of meditation a day.

Another example of when I succeeded by going small: in 2020 I decided to draw a portrait of my eldest daughter Emma, and I set the deadline for her birthday, at the end of November.

For months nothing happened although the drawing activity was on my weekly planner as “start drawing Emma”.

I kept procrastinating until I finally went small, writing in the planner “choose pencils and paper” and I knocked down the first domino…. A domino effect started, and I drew every week since, finishing the portrait on time.

The problem is that we often think that a change is meaningful only if it stands out loud and clear, otherwise it’s a meaningless one which is not worth the effort.

We tend to be not specific enough about our goals (i.e. “I want to lose weight”) and we have an ALL-OR-NOTHING mentality, by which we easily give up a goal, a task or a habit, if everything is not perfectly set up to fulfil our expectations of getting to the result. We WANT to see that result, there in front of us, NOW!

It doesn’t work like that!

One small win triggers other small wins, and all together they contribute to your final success, your growth.

To build a habit you have to make it obvious, easy, enjoyable and rewarding…. and start SMALL.

Dave Brailsford was hired to improve the performance of the British cycling team in 2003. He believed in what he called the “Aggregation of marginal gains; the 1% margin for improvement in everything you do”.

He and his team searched for that 1% improvement in unthinkable areas, from the kind of pillow and mattress to improve sleep, the way to wash hands to prevent infections, the gel used for massages, to more obvious ones such as the uniform’s fabric and the saddle’s design.

Putting all the 1% improvements together, the result was a compounding effect that took the British team to dominate cycling competitions from 2007 to 2017: Tour de France 5 victories, Olympic/Paralympic’s 66 gold medals and World championship 178 wins.

Once you’ve figured out what really matters, keep finding what matters most until there is one thing left. When you find your one thing remember this: