The start of the new year brings new beginnings and for a lot of people that can take the form of a new year’s resolution.
Losing weight, getting healthy, saving money… these are a few common new year’s resolutions that all have something in common. They’re all very broad goals.
What’s wrong with a goal? Well, nothing. But something I’ve noticed is that a lot of goals are never fully fleshed out and fall to the wayside after a short period of time.
Some anecdotal evidence of this is currently happening at my gym. Every January the place is a madhouse. The parking lot is always full and good luck trying to find a machine to work on. Come February though, it’s all back to normal.
So what happened to all of these people? They had a goal they wanted to achieve, but they didn’t develop a habit in order to make it happen.
The Problems With Goals
When we want to change an aspect of our lives, setting a goal is often the logical first step. But there are some problems with this approach.
Goals require work. Humans by nature are generally lazy creatures. Why hunt and gather when I can just farm and cultivate my food? If we perceive something is taking too much of our energy, with not a lot of benefit, we stop doing it!
Goals rely on factors that we do not always have control over. Sometimes reaching a goal isn’t possible, no matter how much effort we put into it. An injury might derail a fitness goal. An unexpected expense might sabotage a financial goal.
Goals have an end. This is the reason many people go back to their old ways after attaining a certain goal. We’ve done what we set out to do and now it’s time to relax or treat yourself.
The Benefits of Habits
Are goals completely useless? Of course not. I’ve found that goals are good for planning your progress and habits are good for actually making progress.
The benefit of creating habits is that it helps us reach our goals in incremental steps and literally rewires our brains.
Habits are easy to complete. Once we develop a habit, our brains actually change to make the behavior easier to complete.
Habits are for life. Our lives are structured around habits. Once you develop one, they are hard to break and they happen automatically.
Habits can be as small as necessary. You can make incremental adjustments to your behavior to build a habit. Once you start, the changes start to compound on one another and at some point, it just becomes part of your routine. It’s like a snowball going down a hill, gathering momentum as it goes.
Say you want to read more. A goal might be for you to read a book a month. Instead, say you are going to read 5 minutes a day for 30 days. By the end of the 30 days, it’s become a habit.
Goals can provide direction and even push you forward in the short-term, but eventually, a well-designed system of habits will always come out on top.
Having a system is what matters. Committing to the process is what makes the difference.
If you have something that you want to do, don’t just focus on a specific goal, rather take the time to form habits that help you achieve it.