3 Habits That Took Years To Develop, but helped me lose 30 pounds, quit smoking and get my dream job
We all know about the power of habit, and we know how much it can benefit our lives if we implement the right habits, and we all know which habits are better than others.
In other words, we all know that we should not eat that donut. And we all know that we shouldn’t drink that third glass of wine, stay up late and feel depleted the next day.
Knowledge then is not the problem. The problem is that our lives is a result of what we continually do, and what we continually do, happens on an almost subconscious level, and the only way to change that, is to focus on changing one habit, one small step at a time.
“Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken” — Warren Buffett
Believe me when I say that changing our habits is one of the absolute hardest things in life, but changing them for the better is one of the best things you can do for yourself, in my experience.
In order to show you how powerful changing our habits can be, I want to tell you some stories from my own life, and after reading this, I’m sure you’ll come to agree with me, just how much you can change your life by changing your habits.
Every story has to start somewhere. This story starts when I was 12 years old — I was fat, out of shape, had no friends and a terrible attitude towards school, life and my parents.
All I wanted to do was to stay at home and play video-games. In other words I was a loser. A big one at that. I had all the bad habits that is the very root of why people are unhappy: I was eating poorly, I didn’t exercise, I blamed my problems on others and I had no goals, and just an overall negative attitude towards things in general.
Luckily my parents were well aware of the fact that something needed to change, and amazingly they also recognized that they might not be the people who were best suited to help bring this change about. I don’t think this is very easy for a parent — and especially not with someone who was as reluctant as I was.
My mom and (step)-dad decided that the only solution that was left — the only one they hadn’t tried — was to send me to fat camp.
Fat camps in Denmark — Julemærkehjem – are quite different from anywhere else in the world. In Denmark it is a place where overweight children go to break their bad habits and learn how to live healthily.
It used to be a place where malnourished children went to get fed proper nutrition so they didn’t starve to death.
The irony is quite striking.
Anyway — to fat camp, I went, kicking and screaming — literally. I did not want to go, and I made zero effort to hide it.
But I went — I remember we drove up there in my mom’s red Toyota Corolla and somehow she managed to convince me that I was going to have fun. I’m not sure how she did it, but she did.
When I got there however, things got off to a rough start. Within the first week I had managed to piss off my roommate and several of the adults there in spite of the fact that they were used to dealing with maladjusted kids. One of the things I remember is that I peed in a bush — because, well I had to go — and one of the adults saw me and just lost it.
Knowing what I now know, I must have really annoyed him in a different context.
Anyway, I slowly but surely learned the ropes and started making some tiny strides towards progress.
We went for (very short) walks, learned to control our portions (because we were only allowed a pre-specified amount) and this served to show us the way. In a sense we were acting like thin people act to become thin.
What we were doing more than anything else though, were creating a habit of eating in a controlled manner and exercising a little bit.
And it worked.
One little step at a time, we built on this initial framework and started eating more and more cleanly, getting more and more exercise and soon our habits had completely transformed.
Most of us left fat camp in much better shape than when we got there and all it took was a few small steps in the right direction.
This leads me to the first habit:
Habit number 1: control what you put in your mouth and move your body every day.
What’s important here is not that you change all of your habits from one day to the next. That rarely — if ever — works.
What works is changing things one tiny little step at a time. That’s why we started with just going for small walks and changing what and how we ate in increments. In my experience, that’s the only way to create lasting change.
But these habits didn’t last forever. At one point in my teenage years, I forgot everything I learned at fat camp and slowly started degenerating into bad habits. Not only did I start eating poorly again, and stopped exercising but I also started hanging around with people who were bad influences.
I slowly but surely drifted towards overweight, smoking and bad mental habits. Most of my friends were the same and it didn’t seem weird at the time. Until I looked myself in the mirror one day and found out that I had almost completely digressed.
Thankfully I managed to use the tools I’d picked up at fat camp to turn things around.
One habit I just couldn’t kick was the habit of smoking. It took me years and years of cutting down from 20 a day, to 15 a day, to 10, to five to two to 1 to one every once in a while to finally getting to zero. It took a long time but it worked.
The underlying principle was the same that we learned at fat camp and learning how to apply it to different areas of life has been invaluable to me.
This leads directly to habit number 2:
Habit number 2: If you want to make big changes, start small
Fast forward to finishing my degree at university and getting my first job. I was exceptionally excited to start working and applying all the tools I’d learned in school.
Little did I know…
The very first job I got was at a consulting company in the shipping sector. It was a very small company, and I had to work very closely with the founder…
Who was a complete fuck-tard.
For the life of me, I couldn’t get along with him, so I made a quick decision and quit after two days.
My next job however, wasn’t much better. Again I was super excited to start applying all the tools I’d learned, so I started working in the banking sector, which had to be a good fit for someone with an economics degree right?
Wrong.
My first assignment was to change words in the letters to customers. Not exactly high-flying finance, but it was a job. I was still not in my right element however, so I transferred to another department which was a better fit, but again still not quite right.
So I changed jobs again — this time to a different company, in a different industry, with a different culture and this time I hit the mark.
We don’t always find ourselves in the best situations, but there are always a million things we can do to change our situation. All we need to do is look for ways that we might change our situation. I know that this is easier said than done, but if we get in the habit of changing things we don’t like, we can take a lot of power back over our own lives, and that mentally is incredibly powerful, and that leads us directly to the following:
Habit number 3: find ways to change your situation until you are satisfied
Don’t let yourself rot in a job you don’t like. Don’t get bogged down in a relationship with the wrong person. Don’t be afraid to change things that are not working — maybe it’s small things, maybe it’s big things.
Maybe you need to change the way you work or what you’re working on, and maybe you just need to tell your partner that you don’t like it when he or she does x y or z. Or maybe you just need to look at things from a different angle. All of this is very common, and we obviously don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
We need to be aware however that we can always always do things to change our situation, and if we make sure to stay healthy, make small changes to our lives until we get the results that we want and aren’t afraid to make big changes when we have to, things can turn out quite alright in the end.
