How I Became A Morning Person, Read More Books, And Learned A Language In A Year

Sharing mostly as a reminder to myself that I can do this. From Belle Beth Cooper who did actually did all those things in that clickbait title.

I came across this idea of starting small. The point is to focus on repeating the habit every day, but not worrying about how effective that habit is. In other words, quantity first; quality later.

A great example is flossing. Say you want to floss every night, but you haven’t flossed for years. If you take up flossing out of the blue and expect to spend 10 minutes doing it every night, you probably won’t last more than a week. It’s a very big ask.

But starting small is so effective, it’s almost like a super power. Here’s how it would work for flossing: You take the tiniest part of the habit you can work with—in this case, it would be to floss just one tooth. It’s still considered flossing, but you won’t make huge leaps in dental hygiene this way.

But here’s where it gets powerful: At first, you focus on just flossing one tooth every night. And you stick with it for more than a week. Then, more than two. Then three, four weeks. You can stick with this habit because it’s so easy. There’s barely any effort involved with flossing one tooth, so it’s hard to make an excuse not to do it. And once it’s become easy and automatic to floss one tooth, you start flossing two.

For a while, you floss two teeth every night. Then, you increase to three. And slowly you work your way up, never taking such a big leap that it becomes a chore.

From Fast Company. Also, I just use a Waterpik.

 

3 responses to “How I Became A Morning Person, Read More Books, And Learned A Language In A Year”

  1. Very helpful, Ian… thanks for posting… LB

  2. I’ve read more books — and read them with better attention and retention — after you presented about Mortimer Adler’s “How to Read a Book” — I’ll be forever grateful for that.

    Morning person is harder but seems to be natural as one gets older (at least for me).

    For learning a language: best thing is to move to the place where you’ll be forced to use it daily, and just jump right in!

    1. Ok, I’m moving to Japan then.

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