A thought flashes again and again in my mind:
I don't have enough time to do everything I want to do.
This thought hangs in my head as I go into my 5th hour of playing Hearthstone. Jeez, is it already 3am? Hearthstone is a computer game. The game is not important at all, except that it is what a 40-something professional man with a job in a few hours is doing rather than sleeping, tidying up, or doing anything productive. Instead, I fire up another opportunity to be frustrated and insulted by sophisticated and/or savage 10-year-olds with nimbler minds, fewer responsibilities, and probably nothing better to do.
It's 6am now?! Wow, these kids are quite colorful with their word choices. I hear a cold shower is just as good as a full night's sleep. I get ready. I get dressed. I push through work. I get home. I lament that I didn't get any of those things I wanted to do done. We all eat dinner together. I put my son to bed again. I tell myself I need to get to bed early tonight since I played all night last night. And somehow I'm in front of my computer firing up Hearthstone again.
Habits are powerful.
However, the most powerful thing about habits is that we are always building them. If you are shy and you decide today is the day I raise my hand, then you are building the habit of volunteering.
But if you stay quiet, you are building the habit of NOT volunteering.
And that is what makes it hard to make a change in life: breaking old habits. You can't just decide... I'm going to be a vegan today. You're already cruising on a meat ship. You've been going day after day, week after week, year after year on the USS Steak and Sausage. What happens if you try to turn toward salad island? Not much at first.
Be careful of your habits. If you do sometimes enough, it becomes all the time. My mom used to fart in private, behind closed doors. At some point, she got used to ripping farts as soon as we got home. Eventually, she just ripped farts whenever she entered a new room. I would always be horrified when I had friends over, and my mom would saunter by where we were playing, and then her hips would shift to the side. And then, BRRRRRRAAAAAAP. By the end, even her sorry's became routine. Every once in a while she would catch me glaring at her and she'd start cackling. I would start laughing, too.
I don't blame her for not changing her ways. It takes a lot of energy to turn that ship, and in the end, I think she enjoyed embarrassing me in front of my friends. And besides, I don't have anything against farting. I was living in her house after all, so she could do what she wanted... but that's not the world I want to live in.
My favorite example is from Magic Johnson (from https://qz.com/work/1229607/lakers-legend-magic-johnson-became-a-champion-through-perfectionism/).
“One day, it was 17 degrees below zero. It was really cold, and as a young kid I couldn’t stand it. So I ran out of the truck, picked up some of the trash, then ran back in.”
As soon as he closed the truck door, his father opened it and dragged him out. Johnson recalls his father saying, “There’s trash stuck in the ice, son. If you do your life half way, that’s how you’ll practice basketball, that’s how you’ll do your homework—you’ll always be a person who doesn’t finish the job.”
“That just stung me to get out of the truck, pick up my shovel, and chop the ice around the barrel until I’d picked up all of the trash,” he says. “That day, that moment, changed my life. From that point on I did everything the right way, and I became a perfectionist.”
I used to think about bad jobs or bad bosses, and I would drag my feet when doing work for them. I told myself they didn't deserve my best work. Sadly, I got used to doing sub-par work... so I just ended up punishing myself. It took a while for me to build up a better work ethic.
So that's why it's hard to change your life. The good news is, today is the day you can start building a new habit.