On Habits

James Clear’s habit-formation, habit-breaking, and habit-maintaining ideas, methods, and strategies that he has so extensively detailed in his articles have been the foundation of my thinking on the subject. I have also benefited immensely from “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, “Hooked: How to build Habit-Forming Products” by Nir Eyal, “Deep Work” by Cal Newport, and “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Outside of these authors, the examples and routines from the lives of my role models have inspired me.

This post is the first part of a series on habits. We will discuss how to: maintain bad habits, design a favorable environment, stick to favorable habits (even in a chaotic environment). We will also discuss the external technological changes that increase the difficulty of sticking to habits, the findings of research on habits, and the insights of researchers on habit-forming products. The goal of this series is to communicate to the reader that changing habits is a science. There is a proven methodology that anyone can follow. With time and effort, positive results will follow.

Part 1

There is a story about Warren Buffett detailed in one of his two biographies that gives us a good glance into a daily habit that has compounded over the years to forge the brilliant business mind of the world’s best investor. Buffett and his wife visited friends in New York to hear about the latter’s recent visit to some exotic destination abroad. As they arrived at the apartment and the host couple brought out the photo reel, Buffett retreated to a quiet bedroom. He wasn’t interested in the photos or the stories — he wanted to read. Buffett has maintained his discipline of reading 2–3 annual reports every day for decades. He had a head start. “By the age of 10,” he says, “I’d read every book in the Omaha Public Library with the word finance in the title, some twice.” When he started his career in his early 20s in the 1950s, he used to read nearly 1,000 pages per day. Today, at the helm of a $540 billion company with 60+ businesses and 360,000+ employees, he still devotes more than 80% of his workday to reading.

His recipe: Habits. Focus. Intensity. Excellence.

If we target to improve any variable we’d like to work on (eg: reading, networking, or singing) and then aim to improve 1% each day, our progress would be (1.01)^(365), or 38% each year. As our habits form and results compound, this simple strategy would result in 90% improvement in 2 years, 500% in 5 years, and 2500% in 10 years. Now, obviously, this is theory — extrapolating a CAGR of 38% over your lifetime for a variable like running would produce unreal results because there are physiological and biological limits. However, variables such as knowledge (or rather, wisdom/insights) or company culture — as the Buffetts and the Googles of the world exemplify — are not constrained by any such limits. There is always room for improvement.