It Takes Work to Do But Wow, It’s Effective For Being The BEST You Can Be
I have paid for a gym in my hometown for the last 20 or so years that’s pretty small and expensive. My town is not small but also nowhere near a city size.
But I go to this gym as it’s the closest and only 1 of 2 gyms in the area, so I begrudgingly pay enough to get me ~3 memberships worth at a PureGym in the UK.
Because of its size, it can get very annoying when it’s busy as people are on the equipment you want, benches are taken up and it’s hard to move.
But the last month or so It’s been weirdly quiet. I can find space on machines with little waiting and can get my session done pretty quickly.
I thought however that since it’s reaching Christmas time, people like to down tools to start again in January.
It’s the old cliche of ‘start anew in the new year’ that I don’t feel works. If you break that habit of going to the gym or doing XYZ, it’s going always create to create dissonance in your mind when you come to start again.
I love the gym but even if I’m away during the week and I can’t get to it, going back after breaking the habit feels like a chore, it feels harder than it did the week before.
Let the habit do the hard lifting for you.
I haven’t written on Medium for a good few weeks now. Why? Because I fell out of the habit. Pure and simple.
Before I would write on my lunch breaks and edit in the evenings, I missed a couple of those times and here we are.
I feel dissonance writing this now as it hasn’t been a habit in a while!
Whatever it is you’re trying to get better at, I’ve found that creating a routine or habit for it removes a lot of the pain.
James Clear’s concept of habits is like a chain, damage one link by not doing the thing once, you may get away with but as soon as you break one link fully, you’re in trouble.
Habits are easier to do continuously than they are picking up new ones every time.
How I’ve fixed it.
I saw the concept from Huberman illustrated by someone on X (apologies as I can’t find the account, but Huberman’s video is here) who explained that sitting down to do anything you will have a window of ‘I can’t be f*cked for this’, it’ll feel hard, but commonly when you move through that window you eventually get to the creativity.
Like wading through murky water to get to the freshwater.
It explains perfectly why many people feel they cannot focus on anything and give up too early.
Myself included sometimes!
When I was studying, I would push through the reading and occasionally, I would get into the flow and smash through essays and only an hour or so later, catch myself, look at the clock and realise I did a boatload of work.
I think being aware that it’s naturally going to feel shite to start with, but pushing through anyway is a cheat code to how to get good at anything consistently, and to even just get through dull tasks.
Habits and accepting that some aspects of your day are going to suck to start with, — but pushing through the suck will make it easier — I think is key to progress and not having to start all over again every week.
How to apply to your life
- Making something you want to get better at into a habit does the heavy lifting for you — it reduces your aversion to the thing
- Break the habit enough times, you have to work hard to get it back as a habit.
- Doing work on anything requires you to wade through murky water first to then get to the fresh water — in other words, it’s going to be shite for a while, you won’t be able to concentrate fully, won’t be in flow etc, but this is normal, just continue until you can reach that focus.
