Habit-Building Made Easy: Superhuman by Habit

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. But I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee

Superhuman by Habit from Tynan is a classic on habit-building. Plus, it’s a short and concise ~100 page read (viz. a high signal-to-noise ratio).

Here are my favourite takeaways:

Table of Contents

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. We don’t give ourselves the ability to accomplish more by sacrificing health and sanity, which causes burnout, but rather by making some of those hard things easy.

You Already Have A Million Habits

Saying that we’re building habits is a bit of a misnomer. In reality, we are all creatures of habit by design. The vast majority of our daily actions are actually dictated by our subconscious through habits.
Even your outlook on life is the product of your habits. You either have the habit of seeing the positive side of things or the negative side of things, and this single pattern will dominate your mood for the rest of your life.

New Habits vs. Old Habits

New habits are things that you do, but old habits are things that you are. There’s a difference between waking up early and being an early riser, eating a healthy meal and being a healthy eater, getting some work done and being a productive person.
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.

Think Very Long-term

A habit’s power is measured cumulatively. Smoking a single cigarette really isn’t very bad for your health, but smoking thousands of them per year adds up and turns smoking into one of the nastier habits you could have. An action whose magnitude is negligible in a single instance becomes a big deal when it’s repeated over and over again.
Habits can only be thought of rationally when looked at from the 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.

Consistency Is Everything

Your results will be commensurate with the consistency with which you execute your habits, not with the magnitude of their one-time impact.
First, be conservative when sizing your new habits. Instead of saying that you will eat a perfect diet for the rest of your life, resolve to cut sugar down by fifty percent. Rather than say you will run every single day, agree to jog home from the train station every day instead of walk, and do one long run every week.
Second, you should be very scared to fail to execute a habit, even once. By failing to execute, potentially you’re not just losing a minor bit of progress, but rather threatening the cumulative benefits you’ve accrued by establishing a habit. This is a huge deal and should not be treated lightly. So make your habits relatively easy, but never miss doing them.

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.
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.

Plan Variances

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.
When planning a variance, make it concrete, black and white, and specify exactly when the variance will end. For example, instead of doing your regular gym routine while traveling through Europe, you commit to do twenty pushups every morning, and then as soon as you return home, resume your normal routine.

You Just Go – Do a Terrible Job

Remember that the power of a habit isn’t actually in the individual execution, but in the consistency. It is far far worse to skip doing something than to just do a horrible job of it.

Don’t Reward the Lazy Brain

For all of its glory and genius, your brain can be a stubborn selfish brat sometimes. 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.

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.
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.

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.

Take Pride in Process, Not in Results

Beyond the inherent randomness in life is the fact that progress lags behind action. If you eat perfectly healthy for a week, you may not lose any weight at all. But if you eat well for years, you can make a safe bet that you will be in better shape, be healthier, and feel better than if you hadn’t. Most habits worth having are long-term ones.
When evaluating your progress in building habits, you need something consistent to grade yourself against. Use your adherence to process, not your actual results. So if you’re trying to lose weight, evaluate yourself based on how well you stick to your plan rather than the number on the scale, especially in the short term.
Focusing on results, especially short term results, is an excellent way to add stress to your life. That could lead to you quitting the habit associated with that stress, thus ensuring no long term results are ever achieved. Track your adherence to process, not your results.

How to Discover High-Priority Habits

The easiest time to choose a habit is when something is a major impediment in your life, or where there’s one habit that currently extends its negative influence into other areas of your life. If you smoke or eat unhealthy food, those would be obvious first choices.
However, the right habit to tackle is one that you care about. If you aren’t convinced that the benefits of quitting smoking exceed the downsides, it’s not the right habit for you now. The difficulty of the habit in question is far less important than how much it means to you.
While I suggest a top-down approach to habit building, picking off the big ones and then going for the little ones, motivation often works the other way around. Sometimes building small habits can build momentum and self-confidence that gives people the strength and motivation to tackle the larger ones. So shoot for big habits first, but don’t be discouraged if you’re not ready for them. The best habit is the one you can succeed at, which paves the way for a lifetime of habit building.

It’s Always Your Fault

Not happy? Assume that it is your fault. Not in shape? Assume that it is your fault. Not as wealthy as you’d like to be? Assume that it is your fault. Don’t have as many friends as you’d like, get sick frequently, or live in a messy house? All your fault.
Rather than guilt, discoveries of potential fault should be seen as major opportunities. After all, when you find something in your life that you aren’t happy with, and you assume responsibility for it, that also implies a power to change it. What is a habit if not a tool to change things about ourselves that leave room for improvement?

There’s Nothing You Can’t Do

You can do just about anything if you break it down into habits and execute on them. That’s not to say that it’s easy, only that it’s possible. The key is to be honest about what’s stopping you from success, take responsibility for it, and create new habits to correct.

Addition Versus Subtraction

Fundamentally, there seem to be two types of people: those who find it easier to add new behaviors, and those who find it easier to subtract them. A simple test is to think about whether it’s easier for you to cut out junk food or to go to the gym. Those who prefer to go to the gym are adders, and those who cut out junk food are subtracted.

Don’t Overshoot

Habit forming is effective and efficient, but it’s not effortless. Habits should always be linked to an actual concrete goal, rather than just exist for the sake of having a habit. In other words, don’t eat healthily because it sounds like a nice habit, eat that way because you want to live longer, be more capable of physical activity, or improve your appearance.

Securing Your Motivation

Excitement is enough to get you through the first week or two of a new habit, but is fundamentally unable to sustain you beyond that. To go further, you need real motivation. Failing to understand and validate your motivation up front leads you to the possibility of entering a cycle of pushing hard on a new habit for a couple weeks, losing interest, feeling bad for giving up, and then being slightly more reluctant and pessimistic towards future habits. This pattern must be avoided.
If you are not going to follow through with a habit, it is better to never start it at all. A downward spiral of failing to adopt habits is harmful in the long term, and the time spent on a habit that never had a chance could have been better spent on a properly motivated habit that would have been successful. Whenever you feel like you may not have proper motivation for a habit, pick a new one and revisit the discarded habit later on.

Start Easy and Often

You’ll get the greatest compliance by maximizing frequency and minimizing intensity. Daily habits are hard to overlook or miss, and low intensity habits are easy to complete. This combination greatly increases your chances of sticking with a habit.
Start small, become consistent, and increase at a manageable pace. That’s how you optimize for the finish line, rather than the starting line.

Don’t Build Habits That can be Automated

The primary reason we build habits is to ensure that things are done on a regular basis. To do this we move repeating tasks from our conscious mind to our subconscious mind, so that they happen automatically. For some tasks, though, we can take things a step further and completely automate them outside of our own consciousness.
Prime candidates for automation tend to be these sorts of habits, those that are less about personal change and more about things that just “have to be done” on a regular basis. Saving a minute or two here and there isn’t a big deal, but the cumulative benefit of removing things from that mental todo list is big. It’s the difference between constant distraction, wondering if there’s something critical that needs to be done, and having a clear mind for whatever tasks and habits you have each day.

Loading and Maintenance

Humans are creatures of routine, and altering that routine takes significantly more willpower and effort than simply maintaining it. For that reason, you’ll often want to have one very strict habit for loading, and then another to maintain. Put in the effort up front and then make it easy.
How do you know when to switch from your loading habit to your maintenance habit? The key is to be able to honestly evaluate what would happen if you dropped the habit entirely. If you think that you would immediately go back to your old ways, keep loading. If you think that you would either slowly slide back to your old ways over a period of months or years, or if you think you’d remain in stasis, switch to a maintenance habit.
The purpose of the loading habit is to completely remove all associations with your old habit. You start small, build up to your loading habit, keep at it until you believe that your new behavior is fixed in place, and then switch to maintenance.

The Habit of Building Habits

Everything is a habit, including the habit of constructively building habits. You’ll find that the first few habits you deliberately introduce into your life will take a lot of effort, and may even feel like they weren’t worth it. It’s important to remember that the very act of building these habits, hard as it may be, will make building future habits easier.

Triggering Habits

Without a proper trigger, a repeated action is just something you sometimes do. Meditating once in a while when it strikes your fancy is an inconsistent hobby. Meditating every single day when you wake up is a habit.
Whenever you begin a new habit, you should think about what its trigger is going to be and to commit to that.

Chaining Habits

A very good practice is to think about all of the things that absolutely must get done in a day, and work them into chains. Unless the order actually matters, the easiest habits should be loaded up front, and the most difficult ones should be last. This ensures that you maximize the benefit of momentum as you move through your chain.
When appropriate, sacrifice your maintenance habits in favor of keeping up your loading habits. You might let your diet slip because you’ve been on it for years, but make a point of writing five-hundred words every day because that’s a new habit that hasn’t gotten a toehold yet. Maintenance habits will very quickly slip back into place on the chain when you’re able to return to it, but I’ve found loading habits to feel like big impositions and sometimes completely fall off.

Habitualizing Input for Instant Change

We tend to focus habits on what we do, rather than what we take in. If we fail to direct attention to input, we can still improve significantly but have only limited avenues for growth. Maximum growth comes when we allow ourselves to consider high-quality influence, contemplate it, and use it to direct habits and actions.

When to Quit Habits

The solution is to only quit habits when you no longer want to quit them. This is the only mindset under which we can make difficult decisions and not be influenced by our pesky lazy brain. This point will never be found in the loading period, only sometime during the maintenance period.

Beware of Disruptors

The three main disruptive habits are the use of drugs, the seeking of stimulation, and the habit of hanging out with negative friends.

The Natural Habitat of A Habit Builder

There is also an ideal habitat for a habit builder, but it relies less on physical tools and more on the environment. This doesn’t mean that building the ideal environment is any less important for the habit builder. Given the same level of willpower and motivation, having the right environment decreases slip-ups and reduces the stress of building habits.
Simplicity and freedom from distraction are the core components of the habit builder’s habitat. Building habits takes conscious focus, and to focus you must eliminate distractions. In particular, you want to eliminate the type of distractions that force you to use willpower.
Having junk food around, even if eating healthy isn’t one of your active goals, will also decrease your willpower. Your brain is taxed not only by the sugar and cheap fats in the food but also by negotiations with yourself on whether or not to eat the food.
Most of your focus should be directly on the habits you’re trying to build. There’s no better angle to hit a nail than head-on. Be aware of your environment, though, and make changes to improve it. Short-term efforts to improve your environment can pay off big in the long term by making new habits easier and faster to build.

Imposing Your Habits on Others

Real change is the product of motivation, either prompted by a problem in life or through analysis of one’s goals. When you adopt a new habit and try to convince others to do the same, they’re skipping the stage of discovering or building that motivation.
The only time it’s likely to be helpful to suggest a habit to a friend is when he asks for help or advice on a problem you’ve solved through habits. At that point you’re sharing with him, not pushing. He’s built the motivation, and may be ready to see a habit through to completion. You can even offer to keep him accountable.

Positivity Habits

Building positivity towards yourself is the process of drastically increasing the portion of the time you consider yourself to be happy, minimizing the emotional toll of “bad” events, and maintaining an even, positive mood.

Health Habits

Sugar and highly refined grains are the most significantly unhealthy things in the standard diet. Eliminating those two groups of foods is about eighty percent of getting to a healthy diet. Focus your willpower on getting them out of your diet.
Items to cut out include refined sugars (including all fruit juices), agave and maple syrups, and honey, and refined grains such as white flour, white rice, and white pasta. You’ll be inclined to find cheats like “whole wheat” bread whose main ingredient is actually white flour, but it’s important to avoid those.
Once you enter the maintenance phase, you can allow yourself to eat unhealthy food under certain circumstances. My personal rule is to adhere 100% to healthy eating while at home, and to eat whatever is convenient while traveling.
When you successfully tackle sugar and refined carbohydrates, you can turn your attention to fats. The greatest threat is consuming too many Omega-6 and Omega-9 fats. These are found in most cooking oils as well as non-pasture-raised meat, eggs, and dairy. For the next wave, limit your oil intake to coconut oil for cooking and dressing, olive oil for dressing, and grass-fed butter.
Rather than regulate your wake-up time, regulate your bedtime. This will give your body the consistency to build a sleep schedule that is optimal for you. If you must be up at a certain time, which is true for most of us, set an alarm for that time, but go to sleep nine hours before the alarm goes off.

Productivity Habits

Twice, then Quit is very simple. When you want to quit working for the first time, don’t. Push through and work some more. The second time you want to quit, also don’t quit. Push through again. The third time you want to quit, go ahead and quit.
This habit is triggered by procrastinating, asking yourself if you know exactly what you should be doing next, and failing to come up with a definite answer. Whenever that happens, simply set a clock for thirty minutes, and begin planning.

Superhuman by Habit: Wrapping Up

Increasing willpower is a worthy goal, but progress is slow even under the best of conditions. To truly exceed our normal capabilities, we must learn to use that willpower as efficiently as possible. To do that, we habitualize as much as possible, taking actions that previously consumed willpower and making them automatic.

Buy Superhuman by Habit on Amazon.