Decisive Moments

[Note: the following was first published on Cent here]

Habits account for 40~50% of our actions on any given day.

But there are some moments, like when your alarm goes off early in the morning and you can either pull yourself out of bed or hit snooze for an extra 20, 30 or 40 minutes of sleep, that can set you down two extraordinarily different paths.

If you force yourself to wake up and go for that run or review what you studied the night before, and you keep that up over a period of time, you will become a new you before you know it. That's pretty amazing. But if you hit the snooze button day after day? Well, let's just say your life will follow a more predictable trajectory.

In other words, decisive moments present you with two options: the choice to do something that feels immediately pleasurable, but ultimately is either not beneficial or is actually detrimental; or something that immediately feels uncomfortable but ultimately provides an outsized benefit.

While getting in the habit of waking up early in the morning to go for a run largely depends on an ungodly level of grit and determination (or genetics for a lucky few), fortunately life hacks exist that can help us adopt other equally beneficial habits quicker, so that when we're confronted with decisive moments, making those less common choices becomes easier.

For example, say you've made the decision to read more, like vineet15 recently did. Thanks to @kwame's awesome share in this week's BOTI, we now know that alternating between multiple books by reading or listening to a few chapters of one book before picking up another, and then another after that, not only makes reading feel more enjoyable, it makes you a better reader.

Thus by reading more books at once, you quickly develop a strong reading so that, when you're faced with the next decisive moment, like after coming home from work and having to choose between reading or turning on Netflix and watching three episodes of Mad Men, you can effortlessly - almost unthinkingly - start digging into a book.

If you're at all interested in this concept of decisive moments, and would like to learn more about habit setting, I highly recommend listening to this brand new episode of David Perell's North Star Podcast with guest James Clear. It's a really, really good episode.