🐢 Slow and steady wins the race

Welcome to The Introverted Path!

Happy Thursday! I am writing this from Heidelberg, Germany 🇩🇪 

I am taking a trip with my girlfriend and my parents - spending a week in Germany and then going on a river cruise on the Danube river.

This week, I am talking about the benefits of building consistent, slow, and steady habits.

Albert Einstein said compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. And in the same way, compounding habits over time can be highly effective.

In today’s email:

• Benefits of consistent habits

• How to build habits

• Links to other content I enjoyed this week

Let’s dive in 🤙 

The benefits of consistent habits

I love hearing people’s controversial opinions.

Basically, meme form:

And one of mine is: Consistency > Intensity.

What I mean by that is, I believe people who are consistent over long stretches of time are much more effective than people who are intense for shorter periods of time.

A real-world example would be someone that eats healthy 80% of the time their whole life versus someone who goes on a strict diet for a few months.

In my opinion, the person who leads a less strict but overall healthy diet over long periods will be more effective than the person who does intense periods of dieting.

I think about this in not only a physical way, but also a mental way. The person on a strict diet may cause all kinds of other mental hardships by adhering to a strict diet.

I feel the same way about building habits. When building habits, you should aim to make it a part of your life through consistency.

What good is an exercise habit if you do it to lose weight for a beach vacation, but then immediately stop once that is over?

There are a few habits I have done consistently for years in hopes that they will still be habits 20 years from now.

Some of those are:

1. Exercise daily

2. Drinking lots of water

3. Getting 7-8 hours of sleep (no kids, yes I realize this will change if I have kids 😃)

I have a goal to live to 100 years old. A healthy 100 years old. I want my healthspan to be 100 years old, not just my lifespan.

So I try to build up habits that will support that.

How to build habits

There are a couple things that have worked for me —

One of those is to start the morning off on the right foot. The other way is to stack habits.

For me, that means filling up my water bottle and drinking it first thing in the morning followed by some form of exercise.

Exercise may just be a walk outside. But that way if the rest of my day gets busy and I can’t make it to the gym, I was able to at least do some form of movement.

The key is to find little ‘hacks’ that work for you. Find ways to incorporate habits into your daily life so that they require as little mental effort as possible.

James Clear, the author of the book Atomic Habits, has a great blog post on how to build new habits.

Instead of trying to recreate that, I encourage you to go and read that here.

Links that I enjoyed this week 💥 

• Three steps to resolving big conflicts (link)

• The indiscipline of overwork (link)

• How to use ‘possibility thinking’ (link)

Best,

BG