Follow the best way of life you possibly can, and habit will make this way suitable and pleasant for you. – Leo Tolstoy
My obsession with habits began with Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit [review]. His book was the first connecting line in what previously seemed a random scatterplot of life choices. Once he explained concepts like triggers and rewards and keystone habits, the dots began to connect. Life’s rhythms and routines began to make sense. I saw how habits influenced just about every life decision. What to eat for breakfast. How to spend my Sundays. Where to live and work. Even the timing of bodily functions. And it helped me understand the routines of success. For example, why CEOs wake up at 5am. How Stephen King writes 2000 words a day. Why great artists and philosophers all seem to enjoy long walks.
So I’m going to focus on writing about habits. And move the website from Kevin Random to Kevin Habits. Kevin “Random” has been fun but it was always a blank canvas. It was supposed to help me see what I was drawing. Who knew it would take four years, but the picture is pretty clear now: it’s about growth in all areas of life. Change is the only thing we can count on. And growth is simply directed change. So instead of fighting change, why not enjoy it and try to guide it?
As the old proverb goes, “for the first thirty years of your life you make your habits. For the last thirty years of your life your habits make you.”
I turn 32 in May. Those thirty years are up! And to make the next thirty years awesome, to be a better friend, son, partner, and writer, to be healthier, wiser, calmer, and more driven, I need to build powerful routines. Make them as the sturdy pillars of my day. Or put another way, on life’s canvas, habits are the pen-and-ink. They are an incredible technology for living.
The collision of two trends sparked this epiphany:
Trend one: I saw the relentless, taken-for-granted qualities of childhood slipping away like so much sand through time’s hourglass. Starting in my mid-20s and sloping down to my now-30s, it became harder to do the things that younger-me found easy, natural, thoughtless. Things like lifting weights for an hour. Hanging out with friends ‘just because’. Starting a new business because it was fun. The energy, optimism, and sheer recklessness of youth faded with every birthday, and they weren’t replaced by equal measures of patience, drive, and careful planning. Instead it was easy to be gloomy, tired, and frustrated. And scared. And a little depressed (forgive my casual use of the word).
Trend two: I finally understood in which direction to take my career: to write, often and well. This begins with blogging but won’t be limited by it. I’d like to try memoir, short story, and poetry. Writing is an intensely solo pursuit. Like all solo pursuits, it can be absolutely freeing. Free to wake up at 8am or 2pm. Free to write for six hours or thirty minutes. And free to spend the day lying in bed, streaming Netflix. No one will lecture or fire me. But — if I want to improve my writing, if I want to produce and publish and progress, I need less freedom. More structure. Yes, too much structure can suffocate, but too little structure can paralyze. Habits can help create structure. By building the habit of running three miles, three days a week, that’s structure for those days. With that structure comes all sorts of other good habits and routines and momentum.
Growing up, I hated habits. They were boring and tedious. They were for adults. Adults were the ones who ate the same cereal every morning and watched 60 Minutes every evening and wore the same stained sweatpants every Saturday. Too many habits means too little creativity. Too much perspiration can stifle inspiration. We’ll explore these tensions, too.
Habits are not about happiness. In many ways, they’re opposites. Happiness is the moment before you need more happiness, says Don Draper. Happiness is a fleeing feeling. It is packaged in a pure emotion that people take and then want more of. It comes on like a drug that helps you forget your problems. Naturally you want more, but it doesn’t answer the questions that nag you during those quiet moments when it’s 2am and you can’t sleep because your brain feels like an itch you can’t scratch. During those empty moments when you arrive early for the weekly 11am meeting and no one else is there and you sit staring blankly at the wall, wondering where the day and week and month have gone.
On a brighter note, heh, the new website will feature new projects, including my first foray into YouTube videos. And singing. Yes, singing. Yikes!
“Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most,” says Abraham Lincoln.
Along the way, I’ll try to share everything. The benefits of transparent writing almost always outweigh the costs. For example, one habit I’m working on is, in the evenings, to write and rank my priorities for the next day. Doing this allows me to wake up fresh and intent and knowing where to go. It’s the mental version of choosing tomorrow’s outfit and placing it on your dresser, so you don’t need to spend ten minutes staring in your closet at eight am, bleary-eyed and rushed and irritated.
That’s it, folks! Thanks for reading, and sorry for using the h-word almost fifteen times…tweet or email me if you have any thoughts or questions or reactions.
