The power of habit

I was in San Francisco recently on a mini-vacation.

I woke up early in the morning, as I usually do, and went about trying to construct a blog post, like this one. However, I was struggling with it. These don’t always come easy to me, especially when I’m not at my own desk.

My wife said to me “Why don’t you do it later?”

To which I responded. “No, I have to do it now.”

It was a weird response because I literally didn’t have to do it then. However, I had trained myself for months to write a blog post in the morning, as a way to get ready for the day.

And both my body and mind couldn’t comprehend not doing a blog post in the morning, because it was the thing we did every morning. So, I laid in bed, looking at my phone, until I finally had a moment of inspiration, and wrote something. That is the power of habit.

Did I have to write a blog post that morning?

No.

Nothing critically important would have happened if I didn’t, but I trained myself to do it every single day until I became the type of human who did a blog post every day.

In the same way, I became the type of human who wrote 5,000 words every day, and the type of human who owned multiple companies. In that same way, I became the type of human who walked for at least 2 miles every single day. When I started, I wasn’t that type of human, but through habit and training, I became that kind of human.

And you can become that kind of human, too. You can become any kind of human you want to be, as long as you can accept that you aren’t that kind of human today and work toward changing that habit inside yourself.