You can download the PDF version of the book by clicking here.
In any problem you face in downloading, click here
Unfortunately
we become a culture obsessed with heroic efforts. we tell ourselves go big or
go home and we watch movies where all the all that the hero does is Herculean
great efforts but the truth is our lives and great things are done in our lives
only through small daily incremental improvements and that's what Stephen guise
talks about in this book.
Mini Habit for my daily Meditation: Long duration to Mini Habit
I talked
a lot about these things which are described in the book named Mini habits so
my personal story started when I wanted to start meditating a year ago. I said
okay I'm going to start meditating by the subject where this book Mini Habits
lesson to meditate. I'm going to do 30 minutes every day. Thirty minutes every
day was my goal unfortunately I ended up not even sitting down to meditate most
days of the week and ended up only doing meditation probably on the weekends
once or twice a week and then I tried to make up for the fact that I had not
done 30 minutes every day so I would try to do 60 minutes in one sitting and
that would also not work out so that was a pretty tough period for me for a month
for a period of around two to three
months. I kept on trying I would keep on trying for this 30 minute window every
day and it never worked out and then I learned what Stephen has talked about
which is many habits and I said okay I'm going to make this really really
really small which is I'm going to make this my goal to just meditate for five
minutes a day.
I'm
going to make it so easy there's no matter what I can accomplish. It I may not
be able to sit down to meditate for thirty minutes but five minutes I can
manage somehow somewhere I can manage whether I'm in the airplane, whether I am
traveling, whether I'm in a car on a road trip, wherever I am in a hotel, I can find a way to do it and what happened as
a result was it became a habit to the point where today right now this morning
I did 20 minutes what happened was even though I only wanted to do five minutes
once the five minutes happened on most days. I would end up doing a little more
and almost like 10 minutes of meditation style were became the standard for a while and that after a while it became a habit
and I was able to improve upon it and that was only because I started small and
then built on big so let's talk about why do many habits really work.
Why
we can’t make our daily chores into a habit?
1. Law of Inertia
This
is actually the problem and this is a direct address in the book Mini Habits
that our willpower is very limited so whenever we try to do something new try
to change our automatic behavior. We have to overcome a lot of resistance and if you've studied physics you know Newton's
laws of motion the first law is:
An object in rest
continues to stay in rest. An object in motion continues to stay in motion
until an external forces are applied
And
that's true for our brains as well.
We have a lot of inertia and we don't want to
change. The brain resists any new change so if you make the change so small
that there is almost no resistance then it's really easy to get into it that's
why it really starts to take hold.
2. 2.
Compounding Effect
The other key in the book Mini Habits is that even though we're doing where I'm doing very small five-minute meditations every day over time this effect compounds and builds on it and builds and becomes bigger and bigger and bigger till the point where the habit takes real strong hold and now it would be tough to break that habit.
3. Power of Motivation
In the book Mini Habits, another understanding why this works is that you start to feel successful as you go on as you start to do more as you start every day and you sit down and I sat down to do five minutes of meditation I would feel successful I feel that I had accomplished my goal and that would actually motivate me to do more meditation. I would say oh I have done five minutes, I can sit for another five, I can sit for another 10 and it would build on itself so it works and there's a reason why it works and how do you how can you implement many habits in your life.
5. Breaking the big goal into smaller goals
It
is interesting addressing in the book Mini Habits that It is really important
thing to make sure you break down your big goal into smaller goals, whatever
goal you have.
let's say you have a goal for exercising two hours every day, break it down maybe all you need to do is one push-up every day and then one push-up will become 2 & 2 will become 4 and 8 and 16 and all so on and so forth that's actually what Stephan guise did, so you cannot fail that's the kind of goal you want to have, you want to have a goal that's so small, that you cannot fail.
6. Don’t cheat yourself
Another
key in the book Mini Habits is that you want to do is you don't want to cheat so what that means is don't
secretly expect yourself to do an hour of workout even though your goal was to
do one pushup that day, so just set yourself a very small goal and when you meet
it you feel really happy that's the whole point
6. 7. Do it daily
The
last probably one of the most important things in the book Mini Habits is you want
to do it every day. No matter what the goal is so small you got to stick to your
schedule and get it done.
If you like the post, comment it for my appreciation and writing further books summaries as well. Thanks for reading.
You can download the PDF version of the book by clicking here.
0 Comments