Making Intentional Habit Changes Within 50 Minutes

In mid December 2023 I had this gut wrenching feeling that I had not been doing enough productive things. In the span of 2 weeks I had been spending 15 hours on Netflix and 20 hours on playing mobile legends, which really spawned the feeling of “wtf am I doing with my life” at the back of my mind. Although, in my defense, I was pushing the rank of my mobile legends account as far up as possible before the season ended — which felt like an important thing at the time.

This behavior got me thinking whether this was actually the best use of my time and whether I was just mindlessly gliding through life. At this point of time I was only using around 16 hours of the same period on working out, which meant I spent more than 2x of my weekly time capital on mindless leisure. I decided then I should stop — or at least reduce — doing the mindless leisure activities.

“How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?” — Jerry Collona

At the time of my analysis then, I understood that a common solution to stopping something bad is to replace it with something good, and just so happened during this period I was halfway through reading The Tipping Point that gave me a whole bunch of inspirations on things that were related to my work — how to increase output exponentially by focusing on the right things — and the burst didn’t just stop at my work, but also at how I viewed my relationships with people, putting a better mindset towards my goals and how I should approach my personal finances. This was when I realized I had dropped my reading habit when I graduated university and had stopped taking conscientious approaches towards self-betterment outside of my career and workout.

“Human existence is an infinitely unfolding process of remembering, forgetting and remembering again”

So like a typical millennial, I jumped to Google and YouTube (not TikTok yet, that’s a Gen Z trait) and looked for books that I could read and how I should approach book reading to actually utilize the information that I would take into actionable tasks, there are 3 important materials that I gathered:

1. Mark Manson’s Video, Why Self-Help Books are Overrated which talks about the existence of self-help books since the dawn of writing — which you could also put philosophy, religious texts and proverbs into the category — but is packaged differently towards the era, and how the contexts matter. By the end of the day you only need 1 self help book if it actually works and reading them is easy, but doing the work to actually help yourself is the hard part. This motivated me to find a system in which I could actually contemplate on the books that I read and actually take actions.
2. ParkNotes’ A Notebook to Save You from Infinite Scrolling & Boredom that provided a system to take ideas during the day and also a pocket notebook that you can have your contemplation ideas instead of mindlessly scrolling throughout the day. Another video by him also suggested other journals that you keep for further contemplations, but I only adopted his 2 pocket notebooks systems (1 for general notes, 1 for contemplation) and 1 bedside journal to write down my contemplations throughout the day. This tackled my issue of having a system in place to actually take actions on the inspirations that I gathered from the book instead of just living with new information on my head constantly. The last part of the problem is now the easiest one: what books should I read?
3. Ali Abdaal’s 15 Incredible Books to Read in 2023 or in 2024 by the time of writing, was the reading lists that I took as my first Goodreads inspiration (if you have an account, we should follow each other, link here). On the reading list he first recommended The Pathless Path by author Paul Millerd in which he shared his journey on making a career that he loved doing. I love the idea of loving what I do for a living and I have always been inspired by people who talks about their career with a passion, especially those who have a positive impact on the society, so I decided that I should read this kind of books too in the near future to see what they do that I currently lack.

With the 3 materials that I have above, I then started on this journey of habit change to actually improve the usage of my weekly time capital to look more like the life I want.

Now that all of the background is out of the way, this writing is more of a journal and reflection for myself to look back on, hopefully this writing could actually help the readers too in making habitual changes in your life and have more materials to look back on.

“To thrive we must ignore the shiny objects and the distractions and strip away the stories that are not our own to remember who we are” — Paul Millerd

With that being said, I will be writing a self reflection and review on the Pathless Path if you would like to read that too.

Hope this helps