Mini Habits
Good morning everyone. After spending some time studying and reflecting, I learnt something different... Something that could help a soul somewhere. It is a major problem that is common to all those that aspire to succeed... Enough of the suspense.
Many-a-time, we all set goals, sometimes it is for our studies, other times for a change. But we tend to fail in managing ourselves to get to that goal.
For you to undertake anything big, you must be consistent. But consistency is what many of us find difficult to implement to progress in our set goals.
Think of a time when you set a plan to learn something, for us students. And yes! we become excited within the first few weeks and are motivated to stick to the plan, like an army in battle swear by their plan/strategy. Then fast forward it to some weeks after, are we still sticking to our plan? Nope! We have begin to lose motivation, the willpower is tending to zero.
I noticed, after thinking along a book, that the moment we miss following the plan for a day, it becomes easier to miss the next day... And that's where the secret of our failures in being consistent fails... Bad right?
Students would almost curse themselves for not having discipline... Maybe after proposing to study from the beginning of a term or semester, they find themselves scrambling to get something into their blank mind three days to the exam day.
This has greatly reduced productivity in the students of today. No more do students see school as a place of learning - they hardly learn - but they just see it as a means of achieving educational progress and there are more students who know nothing about the reason behind their time in school... I can just keep going on and on, but let me begin to analyze the problem so a solution can be proffered at the end of this post.
Sometimes, remember, we don't just feel like following our plan, maybe due to an excuse or more...and this one day off the plan means there is a break in the order of such plan, and as an army fail to stick to their plan for 30 mins, failure lurks near...ready to swallow up the days of effort. This shows that when our bodies offer resistance, it is very likely that we will fail in our pursuit... If only we can bypass this resistance, then we can be free.
This is where the concept of "mini habits" comes in. This has proven to be a very powerful weapon to overcome this resistance.
What is "mini habit"?
Remember! For you to be consistent in your pursuit/plan, you must make it an habit right?But then it's very difficult to form a habit, especially a good one, but easier to form a mini habit.
As the name suggests, a habit developed from a small goal - mini habit is. Let us look at a scenario:
I started out learning coding with the aim of becoming mastering it in a very short time. Initially I believed it wasn't so difficult and would be easy to achieve with determination. Think of it, that was a big goal... real big! After a couple of weeks, motivation began to die down, it was getting harder than I ever imagined. At a point, I gave up in mind, no more willpower to keep me going... Then I skipped a day, then another and another until it became an habit to skip days... At the end, the few weeks of learning became dust. Painful right? It really was for me. Took me some months to understand the whole mystery behind learning to code by the self-taught approach, I realized that I had a very good ambition but the wrong plan. I changed my goal to... "learn a new coding term or concept that is beneficial to solving a real world problem everyday." This was the magic! I find it harder to skip a day. How will my pride make me stay a day without learning just one thing? I knew if I didn't, I won't be happy and it was a big slap on my face. Soon, I saw myself progressing quickly than I thought... Why? Most times, I ended up learning more stuffs than I expected and was progressing quickly that I was shocked to see myself at that point.
In conclusion, If you learn 1% a day and miss the next day, you lose 1% of the already acquired knowledge...