slowly, then all at once
A fairly embarrassing development of the past year is that I talk about Atomic Habits a lot now. It's the kind of airport book that I usually sneer at, and it is not what I would call a good book: it's poorly written, it makes a lot of assumptions about my life goals and personal capability that I do not appreciate, and most of the advice in it did not really work for me. I just want to enjoy my life and be able to do things I care about well, and I look to advice books to help me do that, but this book, like a lot of others, makes the core assumption that the end goal of human existence is founding a SaaS startup. There's an episode of If Books Could Kill where they roast the shit out of it and I generally agree with their position. There are a few pieces of really good advice in it but they could just be a blog post instead of a whole ass book. All that said the book actually changed my life, really just because of one thing: the "2-minute rule". The idea is if you want to start a positive habit you give yourself the smallest, easiest version of it to start out with. If you want to go to the gym, you literally "go to the gym": walk in, don't make yourself do anything, and leave. You just want to form the habit of going there. Once you do that, you can start by doing, like, one set, and just keep slowly building from there.
As a rule I hate lifehacking stuff like this. I resent the idea that a complex, nuanced being like myself can be tricked into forms of change through what are basically biological monkeypatches. Unfortunately this one really worked. I set minimum viable versions of some habits I always struggle with -
- Journaling: write one sentence
- Exercise: pick up the hand weights I have in my office
- Housekeeping: clean one thing (literally put something in the trash or dishwasher)
- Meditation: do 5 minutes
And I was able to keep up with them pretty consistently. A thing the book really emphasizes is the power of compounding results: if you're 1% better every day, it's almost impossible to notice in the moment, but over the course of a year you become some sort of walking god. This is another one of those self-helpy bullshit things I hate hearing but the grain of truth is there. Slow, small improvements gradually lead to massive change over time.
So for months I was doing the bare minimum version of all these things. I don't know that in the moment my life felt like it was getting that much better. But over time that difference became pretty glaring. Over the course of about a year, I went from 5 minutes of meditation to 10-20 a day. I went from picking up my 15-pound weights to doing 30-45 minutes of cardio most mornings. I stacked a few other positive habits on this chain (habit stacking is another big thing from the book - if you already do something every day, add something you want to start doing onto it), so I've been doing skincare and trying to be better about actually eating breakfast. I still only require myself to do the bare minimum version of each thing - if I want to do these every day, I have to allow for the days where I have to get it all done in 20 minutes - but a lot of days I end up spending a couple hours in the morning really trying to do my best at each habit.
When I started I was feeling completely stuck. My mom had just died and I felt like a pinball bouncing around an arcade machine. Nothing in my life really felt like I had any control over it. This was not an easy thing to shake. It took months of doing this stuff for me to really notice a difference in how I felt. But being able to do anything led me to be able to start doing more. I spent a lot of those early months navigating the slow, painful process of addressing issues with my physical and mental health I'd been putting off for a while. And as I kept chipping away at making those positive changes, the pace kept picking up.
The boulder really started rolling down the hill around June. The weather getting nice probably didn't hurt either, but I don't think I can chalk it all up to Vitamin D. I've been able to get things done that felt like pulling teeth before, spent more days than not feeling pretty good about my life, and accomplished things I'd either thought were completely out of my reach or were too difficult to even try. In the last two months I learned to sail, traveled to six countries, and quit smoking after 16 years(!).
I don't know that I'll manage to keep up this level of momentum. Things happen in your life and sometimes just getting out of bed is the best you can do on a given day. I am pretty skeptical of "one simple trick changed my life" and I don't want to claim I have permanently solved all my problems with the power of the 2-minute rule. But at least for right now, I'm in a much better place than I started, and I don't think I'd have gotten here if I hadn't started by sitting in silence for 5 minutes and picking up some weights. So, as much as it pains me, consider this a letter of recommendation for Atomic Habits. Although really you can just read the bullet points, it's fine.