Elastic Habits: How to Create Smarter Habits That Adapt to Your Day

by Stephen Guise

Nobody else can live your life for you, no matter how much they love you.

habits are the most leveraged aspect of our lives, and we get to choose them.

It’s not always the lack of desire that stops us (I wanted to exercise); sometimes it’s the lack of hope, belief, and self-trust that saps our energy and convinces us we can’t do it. I felt that. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to exercise once my slump ended.

When your situation changes your objective, it calls for a new strategy.

Discipline is driven by external punishment and reward. Self-discipline, however, is driven by freedom and practice.

Discipline is what authority figures do to us to keep us in check. Self-discipline

discipline is what we do for ourselves to gain control of our lives and become the people we desire to be.6

You need to like and respect what you’re doing (and all it entails) if you want to keep doing it for weeks, months, and years. That means you can’t feel like a slave to your goals; you must feel like—and be—the master. What do slaves always want? Freedom from whatever enslaves them. You’ll quit anything

Goals are “an aim or desired result.”

Habits are “a settled or regular tendency or practice.”

“Strength without balance, agility, coordination, and explosiveness is strength that's athletically unusable.” ~ Christopher Sommer

You can watch someone succeed, but just because you’ve seen their tactics does not mean that you can replicate their success.

Fighting when you’re prepared produces the best results and the most satisfaction.

The subconscious mind resists all changes at first. It’s perfectly content to do what it has always done. Thus, it is always prepared to stop any aggressive attempt you make to change for the better.

The sovereign could be seen as the typical goal or program that tells you exactly what to do at all times. When you follow a strict program like that, you have no input and can’t do your job as the general, which is to look at the battlefield of your life and adjust your strategy.

“There’s no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn’t follow from that that more choice is better than some choice.” — Barry Schwartz

I have no reason to fret, regret, or complain. There’s always something better out there, but good doesn’t become bad in the presence of great.

You do not have to decide what level of habit you want to do today.

Remember, elastic means resilient, especially while being stretched. If you ignore the Mini level, your habit will shatter when you need that smaller win to keep going. Allow your habit to flex in all directions, and it will be resilient to life’s hardest punches.

Commitments are always a risk/reward proposition. If you fail, you lose self-trust (risk). If you succeed, you gain self-trust (reward).

Proactivity means you cause things to happen with no external input necessary. It means that you’re the stimulus in your environment.

fatigue and choice paralysis.

Not all behaviors, however, are suited for habit formation. For example, you might not want to or need to tend to your garden every day.

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”