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(Click here to listen to the article: Why Habit-Change Is Almost Always Temporary)
How long does it take to create a habit?
In general, people will tell you that it takes about 21 days for a habit to settle in. However, that statistic is slightly misplaced. It takes just one second to make a decision. It also takes one second to make quite another decision.
Let’s say you enter a hotel and they offer you tiny, warm baked muffins.
You had no intention of eating those muffins, but there they are, right in front of you. How can one measly muffin harm your health? Every time you return to the reception, you are offered yet another muffin, and in a short while, you have developed a habit.
But the habit started at the moment you took the very first muffin.
If you had decided that sugar wasn’t good for you, or that you had a health concern, you would have avoided the temptation in the first instance. In that case, there would be no habit to develop at all.
If it takes just a second to create a habit, why aren’t we able to sustain it?
The answer is that habits don’t last without a system. A habit system is not about doing more things. It is about reducing inefficiencies so that the behaviour becomes easier to repeat over time.
Let’s say you decide that you want to learn a language. On the first day, you spend 30 minutes learning Greek. You do the same the next day, and the day after that. However, after a week or a month, the habit hits a pothole. Despite putting in your twenty-one days, you’re back where you started.
To learn a language, you need time, a place, and a learning method.
At first, you don’t always know what you’re doing. However, after 15 to 20 days, you begin to notice inefficiencies in the system. You find a better place to work. You adjust the timing. You narrow down the learning method, because following half a dozen approaches only creates confusion.
In those first two or three weeks, you are not “building a habit”. You are creating efficiency. Without that efficiency, the habit becomes tiring, and giving up is easy.
It’s a similar issue with muffins.
Let’s say you’re home from that “muffin hotel”. If you have muffins in the house, you’re going to eat them. But what if you reduce the ease of getting to them? If you put them in the freezer, it’s no longer easy to grab one on impulse. If you don’t buy muffins in the first place, you have to jump through several hoops to get one.
Having muffins close at hand and ready to eat is inefficient for your health. Once you remove those inefficiencies, you automatically have a system that works.
A system is what I needed in my business as well.
When I started out with Psychotactics, one of my main goals was to get consulting clients. However, consulting takes up a lot of time, so I decided instead to speak at events and sell The Brain Audit. Things didn’t work out smoothly at first. At my very first event, I forgot what I had to say and took a ten-minute break. At other events, people fell asleep or looked clearly disinterested. Sometimes we sold fifty copies of the book, and sometimes just three.
All of these were inefficiencies.
It would have been easy to say, “I’m just not good at this.” But for anything to work, a system has to be developed. Over time, I figured out which parts made people laugh, when to involve the audience, and how to segue into a sales pitch so that people were keen to line up and buy the product.
All of this selling might not seem like a habit, but it is.
A habit is just a momentary decision to change your behaviour.
What makes that decision repeatable is the system you build around it. Only when you remove inefficiencies does the habit become smooth and, often, almost effortless.
Habits survive not because you try harder. They survive because your system works.
