We want to do three things on the road to habit:
Strengthen our willpower
Make progress in the present moment
Not exhaust our willpower
Losing any one of those three things would be a problem: Who is ok with always having
weak self-control? Who wants to "train" for 3 months before making any progress in life?
Who wants to burn out from willpower exhaustion? Uh...nobody.
Seeing those three tall orders doesn't instill confidence in a possible answer,but small
steps satisfy all three requirements. We'll cover them, one by one.
Mini Habits For Willpower Strength
What good is strong willpower if you only have it for two hours a day? We want our willpower
to last the whole day. Endurance training at the gym involves lifting lighter weights with
higher repetition, which trains the muscle to endure. Mini habits are the same way. We're
giving ourselves low-willpower tasks, but with high frequency. It takes very little willpower
to do one push-up (perhaps just a sliver more than you'd think though-starting something
truly is the hardest part,especially in regards to willpower).
Over time, this frequent repetition of forcing ourselves to perform achievable tasks makes
our willpower stronger. It's practice.
Mini Habits For Progress
The biggest question of the Mini Habits system is surely regarding the meaningfulness of
doing just one push-up a day or thinking one positive thought per day. One way to
answer this is to try it yourself and see what happens, but this question still needs to be
addressed logically. How can this practice of doing seemingly meaningless quantities of
work pay off with real results? There are two ways that it pays off.