300 is 10 times 30 - 10 habits, 30 days per habit. For the first 30 days, you will focus on building on a habit that improves your life. You will think about this habit every day for all 30 days. You will do this for a total of 10 different habits. Afterwards, you will have dramatically improved your life. Either you will commit to improving your life starting today, of you won’t do it all - it is up to you!

Foundations:

Here, I discuss the foundational ideas that will guide your self improvement.

  • Willpower is finite: For the longest time, I thought that I had infinite willpower. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Whenever you make a decision, it uses up a finite reserve of willpower that you have that is replenished every morning. With this new insight, the key to improving your life is to design your environment so that you expend as little willpower as possible. Have trouble eating too much junk food? Stop buying it. Have trouble staying up late on the internet? Never bring your laptop / cell phone into your bedroom. This will serve as a guiding principle about how you will change your life to make new habits. The key to improving your life is to recognizing the situations that trigger your habits, removing them, and replacing them with new situations and habits. Warning: this is extremely difficult. Most of the time when we do things, we aren’t aware of why. The majority of your work will be identifying what exactly triggers the negative habit that you want to replace.

  • What is a habit? A habit is something that you do automatically without even thinking about it. According to Aristotle, 95 percent of what we do is based on habits. They are so automatic that you are unlikely to even know why you do most of what you do! You will master a behavior in your life when you automatically do something positive without even thinking about it. For instance, suppose that you agree that it is beneficial to make every situation a win-win situation. While cognitively this is obviously a good idea, you only have mastered this concept when you do it every time you are about it. Below, I’ll describe a methodology for creating these habits. The goal of creating habits / systems is that it reduces the cognitive load of the things that you regularly do so that you can focus on new things.

  • Sometime isn’t a time, now is a time. If you are serious about improving your life, you will attempt to make changes in your life now. People who say they will make changes eventually are selling themselves short.

  • Habit cards and public commitment: if you are serious about forming a new habit, write it down on a note card. On the back of the card, create a grid with 30 boxes. Everyday, you will write the date when you accomplish that habit. If you fail to do the habit that day, rip the card in half and start over. It is essential that you do these things every single day. Likewise, tell as many people as possible about what you are doing. If you are feeling reluctant about publically sharing your commitment, then you need to be honest with yourself that you aren’t serious about making this happen.

  • Humility: It is essential to be comfortable with the fact that you have internalized many things about the world that are incorrect or maladaptive and that you are unaware of. By being open to your weakness, you are best able to improve.

In summary, you will be able to dramatically improve your life right now by creating positive habits (and eliminating negative ones) that allow you to make most effective use of your limited willpower.

The Habits

  • Get off the internet/tv in the evenings / no screens in the bedroom: By getting off the internet, you will allow yourself to reflect upon your day and naturally fall asleep. A relaxing and reflective time before bed is a foundational habit that will be essential in the development of all other habits. Pick a time in the evening (eg. 10 pm). After this time, do not go on any non-work related websites (eg. Facebook, youtube, news sites). Furthermore, don’t go on your phone, watch TV, go on the computer, etc. For more information, I suggest researching evening routines and sleep hygiene. In the evening, in addition to reflecting about my day, I pack things for the next morning and reflect on the positive things in my life. I highly recommend not reading upsetting and negative news as this clouds your mind before you go to sleep.

  • Identify your top two priorities for the next day each evening: By identifying your top priorities, you will be able to get more of what you want done when you want it done. In order to hit the ground running when your willpower is the highest, spend 10-15 mins each evening thinking about the most important one or two things that you will do tomorrow during your unstructured time. This will help you focus on getting things done rather than thinking about what you need to be doing.

  • Make every situation into a win-win situation: A win-win situation is a situation where both parties benefit. The more that you can create win-win situations in your life, the more that others will love to interact with you and the more you will feel fulfillment from making positive change in your world. Every night, spend 10-15 minutes thinking about the interactions that you had that day. For every interaction, think about how that could be made into a win for both you and the other party involved. Likewise, think about how when you enter these interactions, you focus on explaining to the other person why it benefits them instead of explaining why it benefits you. Likewise, if you find yourself frequently entering interactions where the other person loses, you should re-evaluate how you treat others. For more information, I recommend reading How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

  • Become more in tune with your emotional states and communicate them: Every evening, think about your emotional states and how they impacted your interactions with others. If there was a situation where you were upset, and short-tempered, did you warn the other person that you were feeling off? This type of emotional awareness is essential for dealing with others and mitigating conflicts. Depending on your situation, it may be good to meet with a counselor/therapist to proactively improve your mental health.

  • Plan Regular Exercise: Regular exercise has many benefits. You will improve your mood, boost your energy, be fun, get better sleep, and improve your long term health. Every night before you go to bed, think about the past 7 days and the next 7 days. Have you exercised at least 3 days in the past 7 days, and do you have plans to exercise at least 3 days in the next 7 days? If you didn’t exercise, what got in the way? If it was your mental state (eg. being tired), what decisions led to that mental state and how can you fix them next time? It can also be fun to do a social exercise like playing a sport or going to the gym with a friend.

  • Start your day off right with a great morning routine: Your morning routine sets the tone for the rest of the day. With a solid morning routine, you’ll be able to hit the ground running and hit your most important tasks at the start of the day. In order to improve your morning routine, you have to plan it! The first stage is to do your research on what different people do in their mornings. I recommend some collection of the following:
    • Don’t snooze your alarm
    • Drink a big glass of water
    • Make your bed
    • Make a healthy breakfast (research this and experiment!)
    • Do some spiritual activity (eg. meditation, positive visualization, read an affirmational text or blog)
    • Read the news, blogs or part of a book to inspire new ideas
    • Shower, brush, wash face, etc
    • Pack your bags
    • Leave for work

    Next, create a list of things that you will do every morning. Your habit card will say that you will do everything on your morning routine list. Of course, keep it flexible and allow yourself to change your morning routine the night before.

  • Create your own habits: While I have listed a number of habits that I believe to be essential for a healthy life for myself, your life is going to be different than mine. Now is you chance to evaluate your life and find things to improve. One of the major pitfalls is that people identify a need (eg. eat healthier), but they don’t adequately flush out the idea into concrete actions. Every successfully executed goal is the result of taking a series of concrete actions. If you don’t plan these actions, you are leaving your success up to your habits. Since this is an area where your habits aren’t serving you well, you are going to continue the maladaptive behaviors if you don’t plan as explicitly as possible. This is hard work. I recommend sitting down with a pen and paper for an hour (at minimum) to flesh out your plan. In the case of habits, make sure that you translate your broad goal into a concrete action that you will commit to doing every single day for 30 days. The end goal is that you will start doing this thing automatically afterwards. Some suggestions for other habits:

    • Say something nice to a person you love every day
    • Volunteer for a cause that is important to you
    • Read books that grow your mind
    • Cultivate friendships and surround yourself with people that improve your life
    • Create a system of saving and executing your todo list
    • Approach every situation with an attitude of mindfulness (see things as they are, don’t add or subtract anything)

    If you are looking for more ideas for ways to improve your life, I highly recommend reading a variety of books. If you are looking for recommendations, just check out the books that I have reviewed in this blog. Indeed, the creation of the method behind this blog post was the natural evolution of me reading these books six months ago and then applying the principles in these books to my life.

Conclusions:

Either you are going to make habit cards right now to improve your life or you won’t do it. There is no time like now. For some of these habits, I invested an hour to create the habit, but I immediately saw the benefit the next day (eg. not going on the internet) and made back that time. While it takes real mental effort to clearly articulate a concrete habit that you are willing to commit to publically, your habits will have immediate impacts on improving your life so much so that the time will be well worth it.

P.S. If this post impacted you substantially, I’d love to hear from you (through email, or otherwise)! I may offer one-on-one coaching in the future for those of you who want to super-charge your self-improvement.