Recently Iāve been thinking a lot about habits. I was so adamant that they are the key to a good life, or at least to a life with more options. For example, if you are able to create a habit of studying every morning, or running every evening, youāll be able to improve your career or join races of all kinds. Maybe even better said, the general ability of being able to maintain habits is the key to a good life. I think itās terribly obvious to everyone that itās not that easy. Because of this we have a wide array of self help books pertaining to habits that could have all easily been a blog post, but even despite this, I found the book āAtomic Habitsā to be good and felt what it had to say very informative. I even took what it had to say as dogma.
Basically the book lists a few tips and tricks to keep your habits and built on top of ones you already have. It feels to me that most of these are based on pure grit. And as of recent Iāve been thinking this is completely wrong. We are not naturally meant to just easily develop habits. They need to be inherently fun. People that are able to do something daily is because they enjoy it. Even when it gets hard, they still find enjoyment from it. So I think if you want to develop habits you need to find a way to make it fun. Otherwise, the minute you break the habit youāll lose it.
It reminds me something a good friend of mine said, to first get good at running you must enjoy it, and if that requires you running 1km a day at a super slow pace then thatās totally fine. Run as slow and as little as possible, if thatās what makes you enjoy running.