Good Habits Are The Goal

I was just sending this bit of advice to someone via private message, and thought I'd share it here on my blog.

I've read a number of "self help" books over the years, and there's one bit of advice that really stuck with me. I think it was from the book Atomic Habits, but I'm not sure. Either way, that's a great book to read, but here's the bit of advice.

Rather than set a goal to achieve a result, set a daily goal that you can repeat every day, which will lead to the result you want. When you set a single long term goal, you are failing every single day until you reach that goal. When you set a daily goal, you can be successful every single day and develop a good habit that will ultimately get you to the results you want.

The daily goal should not be something generic like "be satisfied" or "make money". It should be a simple daily task which is achievable simply by going through the motions. There's even a difference between "write a whole article" versus "sit down to write for 30 minutes".

By setting a daily goal to write for 30 minutes, it doesn't actually matter if you produce good content, or a whole article, or whatever. The point is that you are working this habit into your schedule. It may take some willpower in the beginning, but after a couple weeks, it will become second nature to sit down and write.

Here's why this strategy works so well for achieving goals.

By developing a HABIT to sit down and write, rather than using willpower to write every day, you don't even have to think about it. It just happens. Then you don't need to resist urges like watching TV or playing on your phone. By removing the choice to fail, you put your success on autopilot.

This works for the gym too BTW.

For affiliate marketing and Wealthy Affiliate training, you can use this to set your business building habits on autopilot. Rather than set a goal to "make money", you can set a goal to simply log into Wealthy Affiliate every day at a specific time and give yourself 30 minutes to explore.

This way, instead of failing to make money every day, you are succeeding at learning every day. You can also apply this to other aspects of your business such as writing articles and whatever else you need to get done. Money isn't going to happen without the learning and the work, so integrate learning and action into your daily life, and the money will follow.