Are you eager to improve your productivity? Gain more satisfaction from everyday tasks? Want to reach goals, realize dreams and live out aspirations? This book will help you acquire daily habits that will help you do these things and more.
What Makes a Habit So Powerful?
Daily habits are powerful – perhaps more powerful than you realize.
We tend to place a lot of emphasis on the big decisions in life such as whether or not we get married or where we go to college. These are important; but we tend to discount daily habits, even though those small, seemingly insignificant routines are just as influential.
Consider the following habits…
What you eat for breakfast today may not seem to matter, but what you eat for breakfast every day may determine whether you are obese or slender, healthy or unhealthy. It may determine whether you live to 100 or die of a heart attack at age 50.
How much sleep you get today may not seem to matter, but your overall sleep quality may affect your mental health to the point where it affects your ability to hold a job, advance professionally, interact respectfully with others and even maintain a love relationship with a partner.
Your silence in a meeting at work today may not seem to influence your career path, but a lifetime of hesitancy and self-doubt may cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential income.
Why Focus on Developing Daily Habits?
A habit is a regular tendency or practice. It’s something you do almost without thinking. In some cases, our habits even come to define us as people.
You may consider yourself an “early riser,” but really you’re just in the habit of getting up early. You may think of your neighbor as a runner, but really she’s just in the habit of running.
When we get in the habit of doing something, it no longer takes the tremendous amount of effort a new activity requires. That’s why you’ll find yourself swinging through the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through instead of searching for a healthier breakfast option (familiar is comforting, it requires less thought, it feels right – all because it’s a habit.)
Your habits also relate to why you’ll put up with unpleasant tasks at work (you’re in the habit of just saying yes and it would take more effort to negotiate) or settle for boring instead of seeking adventure.
We’re creatures of habit, and the many daily habits we have become accustomed to are the very fabric of our lives.
Healthy Habits? Healthy You!
I’ve found that creating healthy habits can improve your quality of life significantly. That’s why I’m going to share the 77 most powerful positive habits I’ve found for improving your life.
As you tackle this book, I encourage you to take steps to break these 77 habits into something more manageable.
For your convenience, I’ve divided the book into five sections, offering positive daily habits for the following aspects of your life:
- Work
- Success
- Sleep
- Learning
- Health
Each of the habits presented in this book is completely doable. Establishing the new habit will not be difficult. Your goal is to focus on the new practice until it replaces your old habits.
That’s the beauty of daily habits: they are small enough to be easy, yet the end result of establishing that new habit is exponential in scope.
For optimal results, I suggest you read the entire book through once and then tackle this book in one of the following ways:
- Commit to establishing new habits in just one area of your life, concentrating on one segment of the book until you feel you have made adequate progress
- Choose one habit at a time until you’ve got that one habit down, and then add a new habit to your repertoire after that
- Choose your favorite habits out of the 77 habits suggested, and tackle them one by one until you’ve established all your favorite new habits
