Creating the Behaviour of Habits

Entrepreneurship Journal Day4: The magic of a physical, linear, calendar

Linear Calendar by Sophia Exintaris / eurydice13

Three days ago, I decided to journal my way to becoming a tech founder, and to do it on Medium, with no traditional background in technology or design.

Two days ago, I wrote out why I made that decision. The reason is behavioural, and the most important of which, is a habit, since it is the most generative of all things.

Habits

There has been so much said about the importance of habits, it feels like a crime to repeat them. And yet, fascinatingly, habits remain so hard to create or break, it feels equally like a crime to not repeat them. So here are the reminders.

“First we make our habits, then our habits make us.” — Charles C. Noble

“Ordinary things consistently done, produce extraordinary results.” — Keith J. Cunningham

“Chains of habit are too light to be felt, until they are too heavy to be broken.” — Warren Buffett

We also find well written advice about this on Medium no less, such as this great article by Bobby Dubey on Consistency, The Key to Success.

Logically, it is simple, we can all understand habits are important.

The hard thing about habit things

Behaviourally though, in implementation, not so easy.

In Charles Duhigg’s Power of Habit, it is said, all habits are loops. There is a cue, a routine, and a reward. And the hard thing about a habit is it has occurred for so long, people are no longer aware of it or what causes it.

Or, in Atomic Habits by James Clear, the additionally hard thing about a habit is,

“It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. … Improving 1 percent isn’t particularly notable — sometimes it isn’t even noticeable — but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run.”

Or, maybe it involves change. Maybe that requires effort, and energy. Maybe it is the law of entropy. In any case, habit is the first problem Angela Yu tackles in her digital guidebook, “12 Rules To Learn To Code”.

Yesterday, I introduced a great online course for learning app development. And Angela is the instructor with many a great suggestion.

The human-centred solutions

Notwithstanding all the tech solutions there are out there to help build habits, I love the suggestions from Angela. They involve two behavioural hacks, none of which is app based.

> The first hack: the 20 minute rule

• Is a heuristic, a thought to think. It’s the 20-minute rule of saying to your brain, “I will code for 20 minutes right now.” This makes the task feel easy to the brain, and overcomes the initial overwhelm to start.
• The idea is after the 20 minutes, hopefully you are so much in the zone, you will just keep going instead of binging through another night of Netflix.

> The second hack: the linear calendar

• Is a piece of, paper. Yes, paper. The thing that fascinates me the most about technology is, notwithstanding our advancement to the end of Moore’s Law today, pen and paper remain a form of technology that simply work timelessly well.
• The idea is to print out a physical, linear, calendar (courtesy of Sophia Exintaris), and mark the habit off in a box, one day at a time. Once you start ticking things off, the markings will form a straight line. And the brain gets into an aversion of breaking a visually straight line. So hopefully you just keep going, and the habit gets formed.

> The third hack: journaling on Medium

• I came up with the idea of creating a journaling habit on Medium. This perhaps belongs to the application of a habit hack from the WSJ bestseller, Deep Work, by Cal Newport.
• The book calls it, “a grand gesture”. An example of this hack was the story of JK Rowling paying and moving into a hotel to finish the last installment of Harry Potter when she got stuck. And it worked because, “The dominant force is the psychology of committing so seriously to the task at hand.”
• In many a journaling experience, I found the activity an exercise of sorting thoughts systematically, consistently answering a same set of questions to accumulate experience in a specific area. And to do so publicly on Medium, is I guess somewhat of a “grand gesture”.
• So in this spirit, let me take on the design principle of KISS — Keep It Simple Stupid, and commit to journaling here, daily over the next 7 days starting today, the following two things:

1. What have I learned about app development? And,
2. What have I learned about the people and writings of Medium?

So, the learning journal today is

• 1) Re coding: Literally today only 20 minutes of coding. Because I am realising I am a new and thorough and slow writer, and admittedly time has gone into writing more than coding. This shall be adjusted. Let’s not forget the main game here.
• But I would say sharing has had an extraordinary impact on my learning. I would have forgotten what I read about the Power of Habit and Atomic Habits had I not revisited them here. I wouldn’t have appreciated the linear calendar and wouldn’t have printed it out for myself, had I not writtent about it. So sharing lessons has made me learn better.
• If I must be nerdy, I think sharing contributes to the “Retrieval” part of the learning process, which is the 5th learning principle outlined in another WSJ bestseller, “Ultralearning”, by Scott H. Young. So sharing works.
• 2) Re Medium: A major surprise on Day 2, my scary article from Day 1 was somehow noticed by an editor. I was approached to publish for a Medium publication, called The Innovation. And on Day 3, I became a writer for The Innovation. Hahaha… I wish I knew what that meant… Well I hope it ends in a positive impact somewhere. Time will tell.

Lastly, regarding the habits of a tech founder

I can see a big assumption made here, that building and honing technical and development skills is a desirable habit for a tech founder.

I can appreciate if someone says there is no one way to create anything. Steve Jobs was not a developer. The only rule may be, that there are no rules. And maybe it does all come down to who we uniquely are.

For me, I have simply loved what Marc Jacobs said about his creative process in his MasterClass about being a designer and creative director,

“I learned to sew pretty well. … I think it’s important to have an understanding of those skills. To me it felt important that I had an understanding of knitting, and sewing, (embroidery, draping, pattern-making, and sketching), because it seemed impossible to be a designer in my mind without a fundamental knowledge of those things. I also had an interest in the construction of clothing. I also like the craft of making things. … I certainly don’t think it hurts to know these things. It certainly has helped me. … It’s experience I think that is the best teacher.”

Notwithstanding that, you may have a different list of desirable habits for a tech founder. And wouldn’t it be lovely we hear it in a comment. Thanks!