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

by Tynan

Eating healthy food may be the single most important habit that you can cultivate.

Sugar and highly-refined grains are the most significantly unhealthy things in the standard

Eliminating those two groups of foods is about eighty percent of getting to a healthy diet. Focus your willpower getting them out of your diet.

Items to cut out include refined sugars (including all fruit juices), agave and maple syrups, and honey, and refined grains such as white flour, white rice, and white pasta. You'll be inclined to find cheats like “whole wheat” bread whose main ingr...

The goal isn't to have a perfect diet in every way, but to eliminate the dozen or so foods that do the most damage, and to enjoy your diet enough to make it sustainable.

When you successfully tackle sugar and refined carbohydrates, you can turn your attention to fats. The greatest threat is consuming too many Omega-6 and Omega-9 fats. These are found in most cooking oils as well as non-pasture raised meat, eggs, and dairy. For

Rather than regulate your wake up time, regulate your bedtime. This will give your body the consistency to build a sleep schedule that is optimal for you. If you must be up at a certain time, which is true for most of us, set an alarm for that time, but go to sleep nine hours before the alarm will go off.

The most tangible benefit I noticed from meditation was that it created a space in between feeling an impulse and acting on it.

What you write about is not important. Neither is the quality of the writing. Constraining yourself to a topic or expecting a certain quality level will make the habit more difficult. Success is achieved if you sit down and write for the prescribed amount of time or number of words.

This habit is also a classic example of focusing on the process rather than the outcome.

When loading this habit, you should do it every single time you have the impulse not to.

On the other hand, if you can set a lower standard for acceptable cleanliness, cleaning becomes a lot easier, and a lot of the pressure is relieved. I recommend setting this level at a nine out of ten, which is arbitrary but should be something that you can envision.

When choosing your cleaning times, make sure that you will not be tired or pressed for time when they occur. When integrating this habit myself, I found that if I was tired or busy, I was very inclined to skip a cleaning, thinking, “It's not that messy now− I can pick up the slack later.” Of course, that's the beginning of the end.

By breaking this task down to the simplest possible habit - deciding which email requires a reply - you can make email processing very simple.

You can also reply to email immediately. Even if you're going to do this, star it first. This gets you into the habit of deciding up front if email is going to be acted on or not, which is the important part. The nice thing about this habit is that because the deciding is decoupled from the acting, there's never a good reason not to star.

The essential habit of becoming a minimalist is the habit of regularly evaluating how your possessions either add to or detract from the conscious life you're living and then getting rid of those things that are burdensome. If you build that habit, you will eventually find your life free of clutter.

“if you want something done, give it to a busy person.”

No matter how efficient or capable we are, we'll all run into days where we just don't want to work. Rather than pretend that this doesn't happen, or use it as an excuse to slack off, we can set the goal of getting the most possible work out of ourselves without wrecking future productivity.

Twice, then Quit is very simple. When you want to quit working for the first time, don't. Push through and work some more. The second time you want to quit, also don't quit.

Push through again. The third time you want to quit, go ahead and quit.

It also allows us to quit when we are really exhausted, rather than when we hit a small stumbling block. Often I'll feel exhausted because the work ahead of me seems daunting, but once I push through for the first time, I get through a tough bit, and then feel like working again. So even when you don't actually push twice, but then quit, you'll benefit from the habit.

Don't beat yourself up if you make the mistake of triggering the habit when you shouldn't− just try to be honest with yourself about the reasons and use that to inform future uses.

Think about the top thing that you want to get done every single day. It may not be the most important thing that will get done the whole day, but it should be the most important recurring daily task that you have.

Then, every day, track what time you started that activity.

This habit works on the principle of “what gets measured gets managed.”

Every night, before you go to bed, rate your day on a scale from one to ten. I recommend that you rate yourself on how little time you wasted, rather than on raw productivity or output.

Compounding requires a long time horizon, which is why I've stressed the importance of beginning with small and manageable habits. A lifelong process of building and maintaining habits is far and away the greatest benefit you

can receive from the advice in this book. Starting with humble habits is the best way to make sure you are on that path.

My strongest advice is to choose a habit immediately, commit to it, and begin the journey.