What Months of Failing in My Habits Taught Me

Creating a habit routine where you fail more than you succeed is the best way to your goals, although it might seem controversial.

The controversy lies in following a path of mistakes instead of a straight, practical, and quick tutorial of successes. In the fast-paced world we live in, making mistakes is synonymous with wasted time, and it is this mindset that we must detach from our minds if we seek to have authentic, personal, and valuable learning.

This is a documentation of my process of creating habits that assist my personal development, focusing mainly on how I returned to a daily reading routine.

Talking about Habits

You have surely found yourself thinking about life, all your goals and dreams that you have always dreamed of but realize that you are not taking the right course to achieve them. My goal was to return to reading, and this happened to me.

As a child, I was always addicted to books. I read The Chronicles of Narnia, spent weekends reading Harry Potter, and was enchanted by Lord of the Rings (still my favorite). I could read for hours without tiring and collected piles of books.

Gradually, this habit was lost; I could no longer read for hours or even find time for it. I began to ignore it and had other priorities, and reading was put aside.

What did not go away was the desire to return to reading, something that bothered me for years, as it was something I knew contributed a lot to my development, and I doubt anyone would disagree with the powers of good reading.

In recent months, I have been trying various plans and formulas to return to books, and here are some difficulties and solutions I found:

The Problem of a Perfect Manual

Reading has always been highly regarded by me and of great importance in my life, so I elevated this habit to the point of creating the illusion in my mind that I would need a perfect manual to execute this plan.

And then my attempts began. On a Thursday in September 2021, I made a file in Notion with my reading rules. I defined what would be an adequate read, an adequate time, a deadline, a goal, and an objective. I spent days on this activity, so much so that it only got ready after two days. On Saturday, I sat down to read with my manual in mind:

• I needed to read for 1 hour
• It needed to be uninterrupted reading
• I needed to spend the final 15 minutes noting the best parts of the reading
• I had to mark the quality of the reading (like apps that manage sleep), how I felt, etc.

All this added up to factors that I did not notice:

• I had had a terrible night's sleep
• I had chosen a very difficult book (because in my head I needed to start BIG, otherwise it wouldn't be worth it)
• I created too much expectation for this first time

The result? A failure.

This is the point of seeking a perfect tutorial: It does not exist. All this idea of over-engineering, of trying to make an exaggerated plan of the essentials can be compared to the phenomenon of Overengineering.

Overengineering in Reading

Overengineering is providing a solution to a problem in an elaborate or complicated way, where a simpler solution can be demonstrated with the same efficiency and effectiveness of the original project.

It becomes very clear that the user in the image was only interested in a ramp and a bicycle. I was that user, and what I really needed was to sit in a chair and read a book. That was it and nothing more. There was no need for all the exaggeration of methods and steps that I created for a perfect read.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

I was in a scenario where my plans were not working out, and I needed something practical to read. That's when watching a recommended video, I discovered that the most important thing is to start with what you want to do and correct the trajectory during the process. More important than starting the right way is to start.

The video I mentioned is called: How to Become 37.78 Times better at Anything | Atomic Habits summary (by James Clear), and it is nothing more than a summary of the fantastic book Atomic Habits by James Clear from which I can separate the main points that helped me the most:

Becoming a Reader, Not Reading Books

Can you see the difference between becoming a reader and reading books? Many people focus on the results part and not on becoming the person they want to be.

I don't want to be a person who eats fruits and exercises, I want to be a healthy person; I don't want to play guitar, I want to be a musician. So, according to the theme of the article, I don't want to read books, I want to be a reader. But this was not clear to me initially.

Understanding that Progress is Not Linear

This might sound cliché but it is important to highlight because moments of disappointment will always come, it's normal. I needed to understand that half the success consisted of just picking up the book and starting, the rest was a consequence. Having bad days or feeling stagnant is part of it, it's natural and very common in people who try to have true and genuine results.

Get used to it, within healthy limits.

Defining Systems, Not Goals

Goals are limiting, and systems open the mind. Your goal is to read a 900-page book in a month, but in the end, you didn't manage because you lacked just 100 pages. The mindset of focusing on goals can make you ignore all the progress you made on 800 pages just because of those last 100. Focus on defining systems; that are more durable and focus on a bigger solution.

A system is something for life or as long as the planning of your habit lasts; a goal, even if successful, may end with the last page of a book. And then what do you do? Focus on creating a system.

Making the Habit Satisfactory

This is the lightest and most interesting of all, as I tell how I managed to combine the dreadful habit of waking up early with reading and having a coffee.

I had long wanted to read more, learn to appreciate and make good coffee, and wake up earlier. Well, I just combined all these to make it super successful.

I started waking up every day at 5:30 AM to make my coffee, learned new techniques for making it, and turned this into a fun part of my day; I discovered that I love testing the combinations of various types of coffee. Finally, I combined all this with a good book in the morning and ended up killing 3 habits with one stone.

Concluding

With this article, I tried to bring my experience of how making mistakes can bring benefits, provided the mistakes are healthy and not dangerous, and how this adds to the formation of a more personal, but genuine and more valuable learning.

I would like to make it clear that nothing here is a rule, nothing here is set in stone. Feel free to take excerpts and adapt them for yourself, or also feel free to take and ignore everything I said, if it doesn't work for you to read at 5:30 in the morning, ignore what I said and do exactly the opposite, I believe it will help you.

That's it and until next time 😁

References cited:

Book Atomic Habits: https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=l&ai=DChcSEwiIgti5gIP3AhXPQUgAHe75AV0YABABGgJjZQ&sig=AOD64_2N5L_UcR7eXcF6NzSHXztptc3o0w&ctype=5&q=&ved=0ahUKEwjIkb-5gIP3AhXer5UCHeVmB6UQww8Ivwg&adurl=
How to become 37.78 times better at anything | Atomic Habits summary (by James Clear): https://youtu.be/PZ7lDrwYdZc

Check my last article:

https://dev.to/lucaschitolina/what-changes-when-your-code-impacts-thousands-of-people-58aa