Episode #49 - Superhuman By Habit; A Guide To Becoming the Best Possible Version of Yourself, One Tiny Habit At A Time By Tynan

Hello, Self Developers and welcome to The Patrick Kelly Podcast for Self-Development, where I will be reviewing  audible books on Self-Development that can change your life for the better this year, and years to come. It is said that if we keep on doing what we always did, we will keep on getting what we always got. In other words, to change our output, we first have to change our input.

Today is December 19, 2021, and This is Episode 49, and today we will be reviewing the audible book “Superhuman By Habit A Guide To Becoming the Best Possible Version of Yourself, One Tiny Habit At A Time By Tynan. This audible book examines habit building in depth. It covers the principles and philosophies of habit building, as well as the practical nuts and bolts implementing those habits. Habits are the closest we can get to having superpowers. What is a habit, and why are habits so important? it's an action that you take on a repeated basis, with little or no required effort or thought. It's a loophole that allows you to upgrade your health, quality of life, productivity, and enjoyment of the world. One who builds habits, channels all of his excess willpower to building habits, which pays off later because he's able to sustain those habits, without using any additional willpower. Don't Spend Your Willpower, Invest It. The glorious benefit of a habit is that it converts something that requires a lot of willpower and focus, into something that becomes automatic, and often outside of our conscious thought. By creating habits, we can move things from the “hard” category to the “easy” category, thus freeing up, willpower to tackle more of the hard things.

Lesson #1: New Habits vs. Old Habits: New habits are things that you do, but old habits are things that you are. If you want to improve yourself permanently, you must develop more old habits, which is done by creating new habits and sticking with them until they mature into old habits. You know that a habit has crossed that threshold when it becomes something that you subconsciously do, rather than something you must consciously think about doing. Each new habit strains our willpower, which means that there are a limited number of new habits that we can have at any given time. Old habits, being automatic and subconscious, can be unlimited. So, the ultimate process for self-improvement is to add as many new positive habits as possible, working diligently to convert them to old habits and make room for more new habits.

Lesson #2: Think Very Long Term: A habit's power is measured cumulatively. An action whose magnitude is very small becomes a big deal when it's repeated over and over again. Habits can only be thought of rationally when looked at from a perspective of years or decades. The benefit of a habit isn't the magnitude of each individual action you take, but the cumulative impact it will have on your life in the long term. It's through that lens that you must evaluate which habits to pick up, which to drop, and which are worth fighting for when the going gets tough. Short-term thinking encourages thoughts like, “Let me push myself to the limit today and get as much done as possible”. This results in missing sleep, eating poorly, and a recovery period during which no significant amount of work can be completed. That may lead to better results in the very short term, like the present day, but isn't making you more productive over longer time horizons. In fact, it's making you less productive.

Lesson #3: Consistency Is Everything:  When looking through a long-term lens, we can easily see that consistency is the most important factor. Just as it would be better to make 5% interest per year on your financial investments for the rest of your life than 50% interest for one year, it's better to maintain a modest lifelong habit than to start an extreme habit that can't be sustained for a single year. Your results will be commensurate with the consistency to which you execute your habits, not to the magnitude of their one-time impact.

Lesson #4: Absolutely Never Skip Twice: Missing two days of a habit is habit suicide. If missing one day reduces your chances of long-term success by a small amount like five percent, missing two days reduces it by forty percent or so. Three days missed and you may as well be starting over. At that point you have lost your momentum and have made it far too easy for you to skip in the future. When you first miss a habit, the next occurrence of it should become a top priority. You must execute on that habit at any level possible. Do it perfectly if you can but do it terribly if that's all you can handle. Just make sure that you do it.

Lesson #5: Plan Variances: When planning a variance, make it concrete, black and white, and specify exactly when the variance will end. I don't like to break habits, but when I do break them, I make sure that it's a premeditated and conscious decision. This is the difference between giving up on a habit and losing its benefits, and simply putting it on pause because there are other factors that have a higher value at that time.

Lesson #6: You Just Go – Do A Terrible Job: When we create habits, we're at our best. We're highly motivated, feeling good, and in a low stress period of life conducive to planning. Just because this is the state in which we plan out our habits, doesn't mean that it's how we'll feel when we execute them, however. Just like a marriage, any habit that's intended to last forever will require loyalty through good and bad, sickness and health. Remember that the power of a habit isn't actually in the individual execution, but in the consistency.

Lesson # 7: Don’t Reward The Lazy Brain: Until you've fully trained a habit, your brain will try to sabotage you. It does this because the old way was working just fine, and the new way seems like a lot of mental effort. Our brains are designed for efficiency, which sometimes expresses itself as laziness. The real danger of not following through with something is that your brain figures out, that if it just puts a few small barriers in your way, it can go back to resting. This in itself becomes a habit, which you'll see in people that we might call quitters. They have great intentions, good goals, and plenty of ability, but something seems to cause them to quit every single time they start a new campaign. That something is their brain trying to preserve its low-energy efficiency.

Lesson #8: Skipped Habits Aren’t Excused Habits: Reinforce to your subconscious mind, that missing a habit is not permission to skip it. Any good habits that you are trying to acquire must be done diligently, each and every day until it becomes, a habit. It is said that it takes 21 days in order to develop a new habit. If you skip a day, then you must make up that day and now you have 22 days to develop a new habit. If you miss 3 days, then you know have 24 days to create a new habit. If you want a habit to stick, you cannot skip days, or you will be forced, to make it up whether you like it or not.

Lesson # 9: Forgive and Focus: Missing a habit is bad. Completely giving up on a habit is really bad. The whole point of building habits, though, is to live a better life. If you beat yourself up and lose self-esteem whenever you fail, that negativity will counteract the positivity of building habits. We all make mistakes. Let me repeat that, we all make mistakes, even if we try to rarely miss, and never skip the second day, and absolutely never quit habits, we will do all of these things at some point. In fact, if you don't make all of those mistakes at various points, you're probably not challenging yourself enough, which means that you will not reach your potential. Mistakes will happen, but the most important thing is how you react to them. If successes push you forward, but mistakes also push you forward, you will have a lot more forward progress than if success moves you forward but mistakes pull you back. Use your mistakes to focus.

Lesson #10: Celebrating Success: Small actions like rewarding yourself with a moment of congratulations, combine to build a personal system of habit building. Just as any given instance of executing a habit is insignificant compared to the cumulative benefit, every small piece of your habit-building system combines to create a powerful method of improving yourself. Everyone knows that rewards work. It's how we train dogs, children, employees, and even ourselves. Yet when most people create habits, they don't reward themselves. They either punish themselves with negative self-talk, or accidentally reward themselves when they fail by giving up.

Closing Thoughts: On scale of 1 to 5, I would give this audible book, a super solid 5, for giving us multiple lessons on how to become Superhuman by mastering our habits.

 *To find out more about this audible book, Go To: www.audible.com and download this audible book, or go to www.tynan.com to find out more information about the Author.

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