A letter to the ones who will build the future

Now that I’ve reached my 40th birthday, it’s only natural that I reflect on my life so far. It’s an important milestone: depending on your optimism for the future of medicine, I’ve now lived between one half to one third of my life. In that time, I’ve learned quite a bit about winning and losing, success and failure. Indeed, I’ve done quite a bit of both!

I’d like to take a moment to share the most important thing I’ve learned so far, so that my children, my cousins, my nieces and nephews, and even my peers can skip over a little bit of heartache and loss and get straight to the best parts of living, and get there more quickly and simply than they may have realized possible. My promise to you is that if you take this lesson to heart, you will be absolutely astounded at how productive, happy, and fulfilling your life becomes as you advance in your years!

The power of habits

So, what have I learned? It is simply this: habits are the most powerful forces in our lives. For better or for worse, they direct our actions automatically, forging the paths that our lives will take, and making those paths stronger and stronger with each day that passes.

If they’re good habits, this is excellent news — each day, you’re not only getting better and better, but you’re making it easier and easier for you to get better and better every day into the future! But if they’re bad habits, look out! Each day, not only are you getting worse, but you’re setting a foundation that ensures that you’ll continue to get even worse every day into the future — unless you do something about it!

So, I hope you can see that the most important thing you can do for yourself and for your future happiness is to actively take control of the habits that you form in your life. Ruthlessly evaluate the things you do every day, asking yourself: is this making me better, or is it making me worse? By paying attention to how the things you do every day by habit will influence your future, you can start making a better future for yourself right now by shaping those routines to serve your needs. If you notice you’re regularly doing something that isn’t making you better, you are then able to find something more valuable to do with that time and steer yourself along a better course. Just paying attention will put you in the perfect position to start making effective changes.

It often takes only small changes to make a big difference. For instance, instead of sitting down to watch TV after supper, you can sit down and read a book. Instead of taking a second helping at a meal, you can set down your fork and push the plate away after finishing your first serving.

The problem with goals

One last thought: forming positive habits is ten times more valuable than achieving goals. I’ve achieved many goals, but they all have one major shortcoming when compared to forming habits: they expire. When I wrote my novel, I did it as part of the National Novel Writing Month challenge, or NaNoWriMo. That challenge had a very clear goal: write 50,000 words for a novel during the month of November. I’ve attempted and completed that challenge twice. That is an exciting goal to achieve, but here’s the problem: I stopped doing the valuable actions that helped me achieve the goal the instant I completed it. With rare exceptions, I’ve never really written anything else! That makes for an awkward fact: I’m a novelist twice over, but I would hardly be able to call myself a “writer”, because real writers write. Every day. While goals can help you do the things you’ve always wanted to do, they are not capable of making you into the kind of person you want to be. (Note, this is why so many people have lost 10-20 pounds — 5 times! It’s because they are often focusing on reaching a goal, not on building permanent healthy habits.)

But what if instead of trying to write a novel at a break-neck pace, I instead aimed to establish a daily habit of writing? On NaNoWriMo, I had to write more than 1600 words a day — and never miss a day — if I had any chance of completing it. But what if I instead aimed for a much simpler, but much more long-term target? What if I instead set out to write a mere fraction of that total, say 275 words (approximately one page per day), but do it forever? Now, I would be writing 2 novels every year, and easily! That means that if I started that plan in 2005 (the first year I did NaNoWriMo), I would have written 20 short novels by now!

And so, I see this happen time and time again: success from goals comes about as a result of the work that you do. But they’re temporary, and each completed goal needs to be replaced with a new one if you are to make any continued progress. It can eventually become a soul-crushing spiral, because your victories are quickly left behind for bigger and better goals. But success from habits comes about as the result of who you are. By committing to taking positive, valuable actions forever, even relatively small actions, you succeed simply by showing up, again and again. This success becomes automatic, and intrinsically fulfilling because every day you’re being who you want most to be, instead of waiting for that magic moment when you achieve an arbitrary goal, only to replace it with another one.

Make no mistake; by focusing on habits instead of goals, you’ll still accomplish quite a lot (and I’d argue even more, as my novel writing experience shows), but those results will flow naturally out of your habits — a pleasant by-product of spending every day being the best you can be for its own sake.

Your next step

So, what now? Take a moment right now to think about who you want to become. What skills do you want to excel in? What topics do you want to be knowledgable about? What attitudes do you want to cultivate? Next, make a list of the little things you could do, day in and day out, that support those targets. Last, start trying to do them. Don’t be upset with yourself if you miss some or even many from one day to the next. Just keep trying every day to form those habits. Little by little, you’ll soon find that you’ll no longer be able to not do them!

Enjoy your life, you’re going to love it…every day of it!