The recipe for making a joyful year is simple: build good habits and cut down on toxic stuff.
But here is the obstacle that may sink your plan – we often misunderstand habit-building.
We think of habit building as a destination – build a habit once and it is there for life. But that is not how it works.
Like the field of gravity, our tendency to seek gratification and avoid pain is ever-present and keeps pulling us down. This is why you may temporarily revert to old habits – you stop eating healthy, gymming, or meditating.
However, going off-track is not really the problem. If we understand that this is just gravity of human nature in operation, we can just shrug it off and restart.
But if we take this as a personal failure, we get frustrated. And when frustrated, we usually give up.
What we need to understand is that once a habit is built, the effort to maintain it is small, but crucially, it is not zero. Even an eagle gliding in the sky has to occasionally flap its wings.
Similarly, we also have to occasionally push ourselves to overcome our temptations to take it easy.
Having maintained habits for more than a decade, here is my learning – don’t make perfection your goal. Instead, keep striving.
For how long? As long as you live.
Life will never be on complete autopilot. Like Jefferson said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
– Rajan