TJ Walker says fixing bad habits requires starting with who you want to be, not isolated tips. Define your identity like "a healthy person," then break it into tiny measurable habits: 47 push-ups daily, 20 jumping jacks, skip buying potato chips. Make them easy and fun, or they won't stick.
Chapters
A hole in your roof. Kind of like habits. Fixing bad habits for many people, yes. If you've got 12 holes in your roof, if you fix one leak, what have you done? Really not much. You're still getting massive flooding in your house because your roof is still full of leaks. It doesn't really make sense to plug one leak if you have a massively leaky roof. I believe it's the same thing with habits. Unfortunately, so much of the literature about habits, great books, online courses, articles, blog posts, everything is piecemeal. It's like, oh, do you have a habit of eating too many potato chips? Well, here's what you can do. You can tie a string around your finger. You can all of these tips about how to not eat potato chips. To me, that's just not the starting point. It's too piecemeal. That is not a rational way of making your life better. I mean, why do we want to change the habit of not eating potato chips? Tea Trey. That's obvious. Potato chips are bad for you. They're fattening. It'll make me fatter. Okay, but let's put this in broader perspective. Why do you not want to be fatter? Well, you want to be healthy. You want to be thinner, but you want to be healthier. Why do you want to be healthier? Because you'll be happier. You'll live longer. You have to put it in larger context. And if you just focus on something highly specific, like, I'm not eating potato chips. Well, you may stop the habit of eating potato chips, but now you're eating M&Ms, which could be three times worse for you. So it's not about stopping any one habit if you don't fix the fundamental problem, which is how do you actually live most of your life on a daily basis? So I'm, you know, there's a school of thought that says, well, if you try to change too many habits at once, you get flustered and you give up and nothing works. So you just. You're better off focusing on one at a time. Now, I agree. You need to look at easy tasks for habits. You need to go after easy, positive habits when you're trying to make change. I like things to be easy. I'm a big believer that most people are like me. I'm lazy. So when you can make something easy or fun, those are the two things I look for when I'm trying to adopt a new habit. But it doesn't work if you do everything piecemeal. That's why I like to step Back first and look at fundamental assumptions. The goal is not to not eat potato chips. Although potato chips are horrible for you, I believe you should start off and just look at your self identity. What is your identity? What is your vision for yourself as a human being as it relates to your health? I would hope it would be something like this because I think most people have the same. My vision for myself is I want to be a completely healthy person, full of energy and vigor and stamina. Someone who is the proper body weight, who lives disease free, who lives to be a hundred. That is my fundamental vision for myself. That is my self identity. Have no idea if I'll live to be a hundred. I might get run over by a bus this afternoon. But that is my identity. Someone who is healthy, who deserves to be healthy, who deserves to live life in an energetic way, in a healthy way and live for a long time. So that is my identity. What's the next thing? What are my aspirations for myself? My aspirations are that I exercise regularly, that I build strength in my muscles, that I fuel my body with the absolute best sources of fuel that will keep me healthy. Those are my aspirations. Those alone are worthless. You have to then go to the next step, which is how do I break these aspirations down to particular, highly specific habits. So an aspiration is I want to be physically strong because I want to live to be 100. A habit is one of them for me. I do as many push ups as I can do in a minute. I do 47 a day. I don't do it more than a minute because then it's too hard and my laziness factor kicks in. But I have all sorts of specific actions like that. One of my habits is I don't buy potato chips. Now. Every once in a while I've ordered something at a restaurant and I wasn't asked and they just show up on the plate. Have I ever eaten potato chips? Sure. Do I have a perfect diet? No. But again, if my vision for myself, my self identity is I'm a healthy person, my aspiration is I'm someone who eats healthy food. My habit is I don't buy potato chips. The number of times I eat potato chips is very low compared to someone who doesn't think in those terms, who just think, oh, potato chips are tasty, I'll eat them. Or I love potato chips, but let me try not to look at it. Let me only open a few and put away. Or let me push the bag. I'll buy the bag but I'll not take it out on the counter, someone like that is going to end up eating a lot more potato chips. So because I have a vision for myself here, aspirations here, I've then broken it down into small, would be called small habits, mini habits. I have to be careful. Some of the other habits. Experts have trademarked so many things. I just mean a small habit that's simple enough, then you can nail it down in a measurable way. That is what I think is absolutely crucial. Because once you have decided I want to be really healthy, I aspire to great health practices, then it's easy to not only not eat potato chips, it's also easy to not buy Reese's peanut butter cups And M&Ms. And Snickers. And if you do eat them, it's a lot easier to eat the tiny bite sized ones rather than ones this big. It all fits, fits into context. It's much easier to start the habit of exercise. Now I happen to be someone who's lazy. I don't want to get in a car, drive across town, go to a gym, park the car, go in, check in, get a towel, get a locker. To me that is a bunch of rigamarole. I don't want to do that. But I do have this self identity of a healthy person. I have this aspiration of a fit healthy person. So I do exercise, but I've got to do it in a way that works for me. For me, I like doing little bits, tiny little bites throughout the day. My justification is if I can do a bit of exercise in the same amount of time it takes me to floss my teeth a minute or two, then it doesn't hurt to do the exercise. So that's why I do things like 20 jumping jacks first thing in the morning. Later in the day, as many push ups as I can do in a short amount of time. A minute later in the day, I want to take a break, I stand up, I'll go do pull ups. Now I'm only up to four pull ups at a time, but that's better than zero pull ups or one pull up. It's about constant growth. And that's what I think is critically important when it comes to your habits, the context, having a vision of your life, designing your whole lifestyle rather than looking at this piecemeal. Because if you're doing it piecemeal, it's like going to the ocean and saying, well, I just want to clean up this section of water 20ft out or a river that's really going quickly and I want to just clean up the water for the first five feet. You could do that, but things are moving so quickly, it would all become irrelevant. You're going to have to do something bigger than that. That's why I urge you. Start off with fundamental decisions about your identity and your aspirations. Then figure out all the habits you need to support your life goals and your aspirations. That's what I think you need to do with your habits.
