Long-term success is built on the habits that we form. Habits like consistency and adaptability are far more important than random surges when you’re trying to make progress.
So if you want to crush your goals – whether long or short-term – you want to develop better habits.
Do you want to lose weight? Then you need to eat healthy and exercise more days than not. Do you want to earn a degree? Then you need to study regularly and do the homework. Do you want to improve your mental health? Then you need to make better decisions every day.
You do that by building habits. And there are some surprisingly simple habits that you can incorporate to build the kind of life that you want. Let’s look at eight!
1. They define what success looks like before they start.
How do you know you’ve arrived if you don’t know what your destination is? You don’t.
So the first thing you need to do is actually set the goal. What is it that you want to accomplish? Be specific and make sure the goal has an actual end state.
For example, when I wanted to lose weight, I had to shift from “I want to lose weight” to “I want to lose 50 pounds.”
The latter is a better choice because it gives you a clear destination of where your efforts will go.
It’s not enough to say, “I want to be a healthier person” because that can mean so many different things. Weight loss? Physical health? Mental health? Healthier how?
It’s unclear information that doesn’t help provide you with any direction.
2. They break their large goals into much smaller ones.
I knew I wasn’t going to lose 50 pounds quickly or overnight. I knew that I had to make the right choices on most days to accomplish my goal.
How did I do that? I broke my large goal up into much smaller goals that I could keep track of every day.
I started paying more attention to what I actually put in my body. I set small goals, like I’d stop drinking sugary drinks, and I’d be more mindful at mealtimes.
One thing I figured out is that I had a bad habit of overeating good food. Too many calories is still too many calories, and you can’t outrun your fork.
I’m not the kind of person who would weigh everything out consistently. Instead, I basically said, “I’m not going to get a second helping unless my stomach is still growling.”
It was a small, easily attainable goal I could accomplish at any meal. And you can apply small, easily attainable goals to any bigger goal you have in mind.
3. They plan for their setbacks instead of seeing failure as an end.
I was far from perfect as I started making this change in my life. I’m still not perfect at it.
But guess what? You don’t have to be.
Before, I was getting it right exactly 0% of the time. After? I was getting it right in the neighborhood of 80 or 90% of the time.
I have always had an unhealthy relationship with food, and I knew that habit was going to be hard to break. I think part of that struggle was thinking that I had to get it perfect every time.
But a friend of mine rewired my brain when he pointed out that, “Hey, even 50% is better than 0%. You’ll at least make progress if you’re doing something.”
And he was right. I don’t have to be perfect. I can sometimes get a second plate or eat something unhealthy, and it’s not the end of the world. All I have to do is get back to it the next day.
The same applies to whatever you’re working to achieve.
4. They review their progress.
It’s important to measure your progress as you go along, but to do so in a reasonable way.
In my case, I would check my weight about every two weeks. I didn’t feel like it was necessary or informative to check it every day. Body weight can fluctuate depending on a number of factors, so the day-to-day fluctuations were more of a distraction than anything else.
Instead, I would check every couple of weeks just to make sure I was generally trending downward.
So regularly check in on your progress, but remember that micromanagement isn’t healthy. Sometimes, people zoom in too far, and they end up creating problems where none actually exist.
5. They remove obstacles and friction points from their good habits.
The easier it is to do something, the more likely you are to do it.
A good example is exercise. There are a lot of people who hate going to the gym or don’t like certain exercises. They have to force themselves to go to the gym and exercise because they hate it. That friction point creates a barrier between them and their success.
As such, if your goal is to improve your fitness but you don’t want to go to the gym, then don’t. There are other options. You can buy resistance bands, dumbbells, or a machine for your home. You can go for regular walks, working it up to a jog at a brisk pace to get in some cardio. You could take up a sport to train for.
The idea is that whatever your goal is, do something that will take you closer to it by doing something you want to do rather than what you have to do.
Because if you want to do it, you’ll be more likely to do it.
6. They protect their energy as well as their time.
Accomplishing goals takes work, which takes emotional and mental energy. And it’s hard to make progress in your own life if you’re babysitting other adults or wasting your energy.
Life is stressful, and you only have so much energy to give. You have to be vicious about protecting it at times; otherwise, everyone will line up to steal it from you.
Work stress? Ex being a pain in the butt? Toxic friend bringing you down? There’s no reason to put up with that.
There’s no reason to sacrifice the valuable time and energy that you need for your own life for those situations. Granted, we don’t always have that luxury, but sometimes we do; it’s just we don’t bother looking for alternatives because we accept it as “just the way it is.”
It doesn’t always have to be. Particularly when your life goals are at stake.
7. They measure progress by metrics that actually matter, not just by metrics that feel like they should matter.
You want to be wary of potential traps that you can fall into when trying to measure your progress.
For example, when it comes to weight loss, I learned that a lot of people fall into the “eating healthy” trap. You can drop all the junk food, drink nothing but water, and work out regularly, but still gain weight if you’re overeating.
Calories in, calories out. I learned it was vital to pay attention to the amount of healthy food I would eat in addition to limiting the junk.
Similar traps exist in all kinds of long-term goals. As such, if you’re not making progress toward your goal, you may want to reevaluate the metrics that you’re using to measure progress.
8. They celebrate progress but don’t use it to justify complacency.
I eventually did lose that 50 pounds after a while. Are there things I could have done better? Absolutely. I had some cheat days, and that’s ok. As I’ve said, you don’t need to do everything perfectly to achieve your goals.
But crucially, I didn’t celebrate my progress with cheat days or unhealthy meals. That would have been counterintuitive, and it sends the wrong message to my brain about food as a reward.
Instead, I accepted that some days would just need to be cheat days, and I didn’t feel guilty about it or view it as failure.
Would I have preferred I didn’t struggle and didn’t need cheat days?
Sure, but I did, and that’s okay.
I didn’t punish myself for not being perfect; I celebrated that I kept on moving in the right general direction.
Closing thoughts…
As you can see, goal-setting doesn’t need to be a super complicated process. It can be simple, though it may not be easy.
The whole journey can be made much easier by focusing on the small, consistent goals, though.
Progress is often slow and steady. It’s making better choices every day, rather than one big choice at a time.
Break those big goals up into smaller goals and do the work, even if your efforts are imperfect.
If you do that, you’ll find that you’ll reach your goal sooner or later.
