TJ Walker argues that happiness habits should be personal, not universal. Beyond measurable health metrics like cholesterol, what makes you happy is yours alone. He recommends adding small wins to your morning routine, like a word game or a minute of doodling, because they fuel creativity and make other healthy habits stick.
Chapters
Your habits do not have to be perfect for anyone in the whole world other than you. Too often, I think we're all tempted to pick up a book on personal development habits, see what the author, the instructor says, here's what I do and you should too. And we try to copy that. And the reality is, all of us are different. There are some similarities. There's really no one in the world who, who needs to live on a daily diet of Coca Cola and M&Ms. All day long. So if that's your current diet, then it's perfectly fine to say, let me be like everyone else who's healthy and get rid of that habit. But beyond that, there's a huge, huge leeway of what makes for a good habit, what makes something really empower your life, what makes you healthier, what makes you happier? Health is somewhat quantifiable. If you have a sugar rating at a certain level, cholesterol level, above or below a certain level, those are measurable, quantifiable, and there are some uniform standards. But your happiness, well, that is completely a different matter. It is subjective. What I have found and what many habit researchers have found is, is the more you make yourself happier, the more likely you are to be productive, to fulfill other habits in your life, to do the things you need to do to be healthier, happier, sleep well, eat well. So that's why it's critically important that you spend some time every day on habits that are unique to you, only you. If it helps you, if it makes you happier and it's not hurting anyone and it puts you in a better frame of mind, I would argue that is a good habit. I want to share with you. One of the things I just have on my own cell phone, my own to do list, I have my morning personal development list. I go through. One of the checklist items is, you'll think this is silly because you may think this is a habit you're trying to break. My habit is to play an online game. You may think, well, T.J. i've wasted half my life playing online games. I'm trying to break the habit of doing online video games. Well, I loved video games when I was a kid, and I practically majored in Pac man and Galaga in 1981 when I was a freshman at Duke University. I'll never Forget I broke 100,000 in Gallagher my week of finals in the second semester of the year. I was so proud of myself. Can't remember what else I accomplished that year, but that was an accomplishment. But I've Gone now, years, sometimes decades without playing an online game. So I put about eight months ago as a daily habit for me to play an online game. Now I play a word game. It could be a crossword puzzle. It could be one of those things where you're given letters and you have to turn the words into it to fill out a grid. But I play a word game every single day. Now. Sometimes I can do it in 60 seconds, sometimes it may take three minutes. The point is, I don't spend a lot of time, but it's just something I do in the morning as a part of my morning routine. It's a little bit fun. It's something to look forward to. And when I fill it all out and get it, it gives me a slight sense of accomplishment and it stimulates a part of my brain because I'm having to think about word order, recombinations of letters. It takes me out of my normal way of thinking and thinking about words. It's therefore stimulating my brain. So it works for me. You've got to come up with routines, daily habits that make your life better. And where there's the greatest leeway is things that simply make you happy, but that you might not automatically think to do. So for you, it might be doing a little drawing each day, a doodle each day. Maybe you love drawing as a kid, you love it now, but you just never think to do it. There's nothing wrong with putting on your daily checklist a habit of I'm going to do a silly little doodle for one minute a day. Is that going to make you richer? No, probably not. Going to sell them. Is that going to impress your boss? Unless you're in the art world, probably not. But if it makes you happier, then there is a payoff, because all the research shows that it dramatically increases the chances that you will hold yourself to your other habit standards that you have. If you can check that one off and feel good about it, you're much less likely to fall into bad habits of eating that donut at snack time or doing any of the other things you don't want to do. You're more likely to to do the exercise you planned for later today. That's how these things relate. So critical. When you're coming up with your own list of habits that you want to fulfill on a daily basis, you've got to have some that are just for you. Other people may laugh at them. I have some I haven't even shared with you yet that you might think are really silly. Okay, I will share with you. One of them is I draw and my drawings are horrible and I do faces and doodles. It's just something for me to look at. Stimulates a part of my creative side of my brain. I show them to my wife and my daughter and they say, oh, that's the worst ever. We thought yesterday's was horrible. This was the worst. And I'll often draw pictures of my daughter and wife and they really think those are awful. And you know what? They're right. But guess what? It doesn't matter. This is a habit just for me that puts a little smile on my face, gives me the tiniest sense of accomplishment, of okay, I'm a creator, maybe not a world class artist, but I'm the type of person who draws every day. It builds on my self identity. Do you have anything like that? What is a daily habit that you have that other people would say, why would anyone even want to do that? Share with me. Let me know if you're watching from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or any other platform. I'd love to hear from you.
