Superhuman by Habit: A Guide to Becoming the Best Possible Version of Yourself, One Tiny Habit at a Time

by Tynan

New habits are things that you do, but old habits are things that you are.

If you want to improve yourself permanently, you must develop more old habits, which is done by creating new habits and sticking with them until they mature into old habits. You know that a habit has crossed that threshold when it becomes something that you subconsciously do, rather than something you must consciously think about doing.

The benefit of a habit isn't the magnitude of each individual action you take, but the cumulative impact it will have on your life in the long term.

The practical implications of this are twofold. First, be conservative when sizing your new habits. Instead of saying that you will eat a perfect diet for the rest of your life, resolve to cut sugar down by fifty percent. Rather than say you will run every single day, agree to jog home from the train station every day instead of walk, and do one long run every week.

Second, you should be very scared to fail to execute a habit, even once.

Missing two days of a habit is habit suicide. If

missing one day reduces your chances of long-term success by a small amount like five percent, missing two days reduces it by forty percent or so. Three days missed and you may as well be starting over. At that point you have lost your momentum and have made it far too easy to skip in the future.

When you first miss a habit, the next occurrence of it should become a top priority. You must execute on that habit at any level possible. Do it perfectly if you can, but do it terribly if that's all you can handle. Just make sure that you do it.

The solution is to plan your day around the habit for the next day. Rather than say, “Okay, I'm definitely going to do it tomorrow”, decide specifically when you're going to do it, and come up with solutions to problems in advance, particularly whatever problem stopped you from executing in the first place.

don't like to break habits, but when I do break them, I make sure that it's a premeditated and conscious decision. This is the difference between giving up on a habit and losing its benefits, and simply putting it on pause because there are other factors that have a higher value at that time.

When planning a variance, make it concrete, black and white, and specify exactly when the variance will end. For example, instead of doing your regular gym routine while traveling through Europe, you commit to do twenty pushups every morning, and then as soon as you return home, resume your normal routine.

Remember that the power of a habit isn't actually in the individual execution, but in the consistency. It is far far worse to skip doing something than to just do a horrible job of it.

The real danger of not following through with something is that your brain figures out that if it just puts a few small barriers in your way, it can go back to resting. This in itself becomes a habit, which you'll see in people that we might call quitters. They

A classic manifestation of this is tiredness while working.

The solution to this problem is to push through and work anyway. Just do a terrible job if necessary, but make it clear to your brain that putting up token objections isn't enough to give it a rest.

Not at all, but I wanted to reinforce to my subconscious that missing a habit wasn't permission to skip it, and that I would still make it up later.

Missing a habit is bad. Completely giving up on a habit is really bad. The whole point of building habits, though, is to live a better life. If you beat yourself up and lose self- esteem whenever you fail, that negativity will counteract the positivity of building habits.

Mistakes will happen, but the most important thing is how you react to them. If successes push you forward, but mistakes also push you forward, you will have a lot more forward progress than if success moves you forward but mistakes pull you back.

Use your mistakes to focus. They draw attention to an area that needs more attention, so give it that attention. Challenge yourself to do better next time.

Instead of saying, “I'm so bad at this”, say “I'm better than this.” That's how you use m...

Forgive yourself easily, but remember the lessons you learn from mistakes. You've...

A fist pump coupled with a “Yes!” might be in order. It feels silly and trite, but it serves its purpose of releasing endorphins and marking progress. It's

Beyond the inherent randomness in life is the fact that progress lags behind action. If you eat perfectly healthy for a week, you may not lose any weight at all. But if you eat well for years, you can make a safe bet that you will be in better shape, be healthier, and feel better than if you hadn't. Most habits worth having are long-term ones.

When evaluating your progress in building habits, you need something consistent to grade yourself against. Use your adherence to

process, not your actual results. So if you're trying to lose weight, evaluate yourself based on how well you stick to your plan rather than the number on the scale, especially in the short term.

Focusing on results, especially short term results, is an excellent way to add stress to your life. That could lead to you quitting the habit associated with that stress, thus ensuring no long term results are ever achieved. Track your adherence to process, not your results.

You can do just about anything if you break it down into habits and execute on them. That's not to say that it's easy, only that it's possible.

An important component of having a goal tied to a habit is that it allows you to size your habit proportionally to the goal.

The very first tangible step in creating a new habit is understanding exactly why you're drawn to it.

To make sure that this motivation sticks, write yourself a note explaining why you're going to implement the habit. This sounds incredibly corny, but it's also effective, and that justifies it in my estimation.

You'll get the greatest compliance by maximizing frequency and minimizing intensity. Daily habits are hard to overlook or miss, and low intensity habits are easy to complete. This combination greatly increases your chances of sticking with a habit.

Start small, become consistent, and increase at a manageable pace. That's how you optimize for the finish line, rather than the starting

Whether for small or big habits, bias yourself strongly towards habits which require daily execution. There are several factors in play that counter-intuitively make daily habits the easiest to maintain.

It's the difference between constant distraction, wondering if there's something critical that needs to be done, and having a clear mind for whatever tasks and habits you have each day.

How do you know when to switch from your loading habit to your maintenance habit? The key is to be able to honestly evaluate what would happen if you dropped the habit entirely. If you think that you would immediately go back to your old ways, keep loading. If you think that you would either slowly slide back to your old ways over a period of months or years, or if you think you'd remain in stasis, switch to a maintenance habit.

The purpose of the loading habit is to completely remove all associations with your old habit. You start small, build up to your loading habit, keep at it until you believe that your new behavior is fixed in place, and then switch to maintenance.

Without a proper trigger, a repeated action is just something you sometimes do.

Whenever you begin a new habit, you should think about what its trigger is going to be, and to commit to that.

If you realized that you overeat as a way of coping with stress, you'd want to find a more productive way of dealing with that stress to replace the old one. So you might tell yourself, “Okay, whenever I feel stressed, or feel like I'm about to be stressed, I'm going to drink a cup of green tea, write out what's worrying me the most, and then take one small step towards resolving it.”

You can also use habits as triggers for other habits, thus creating a reliable chain.

A very good practice is to think about all of the things that absolutely must get done in a day, and work them into chains. Unless the order actually matters, the easiest habits should be loaded up front, and the most difficult ones should be last. This ensures that you maximize the benefit of momentum as you move through your chain.

Chains are a powerful tool to make organizing series of habits effortless, but it's important to remember that the links of the chain are more important than the chain itself. Don't allow a break in the chain to ruin all if its components. Allow chains to serve as shortcuts to habit-building, but don't let them prevent you from executing on habits when they break.

The solution is to only quit habits when you no longer want to quit them. This is the only mindset under which we can make difficult decisions and not be influenced by our pesky lazy brain. This point will never be found in the loading period, only some time during the maintenance period.

quit. One of my habits is to expose myself to ideas I don't naturally agree with,

Building habits takes conscious focus, and to focus you must eliminate distractions. In particular, you want to eliminate the type of distractions that force you to use willpower.

Most of your focus should be directly on the habits you're trying to build. There's no better angle to hit a nail than head-on.

From now on, every time you have any negative thought, simply think of one positive aspect of the situation. The positive aspect doesn't have to be equal in magnitude to the negative aspects, it just has to exist.

Whether other people are doing smart things, dumb things, things that help us, or things that harm us, both parties can be best served through fostering compassion and minimizing focus on how wrong the other is.

“Remember that everyone is just doing their best and trying to be happy, just like you.”

I use health as a general term to describe habits which will improve your life expectancy, average well-being, as well as your ability to use your physical and mental facilities to their maximum.