How To Build Good Habits

How to build good habits? Focus on deep learning, but just a little every day.

How long does it take you to read a book? A week, a month, a year? Depending on how you prioritise your reading and the intensity of the book, you can find that even shorter works may take much longer to complete than you think.

So one of the key ways to think about how you read and consume information and knowledge is to read just a little every day.

I am currently reading The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on wisdom, perseverance and the art of living, featuring translation of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. A book by Ryan Holiday, best selling author of The Obstacle is the Way and Stephen Hanselman.

A book with a title like this may seem a little heavy, but it is a perfect example of just a little every day. The 366 chapters of the book are ‘bite sized’ and take just a few minutes to read and understand. For me, this is ideal. It helps me to build good habits because even today, as I write this, I am 24 chapters into the book by reading just a little every day.

So this, for me, is a great way of building knowledge and gaining a deep understanding of a new subject.

Researching how this might apply more generally, I have found examples of this ‘little and often’ approach in fitness training, meditation, food consumption, and beyond. It’s a fascinating approach that may intuitively feel as though you are making only slight progress at the start. But stay tuned, keep repeating the good habits and before very long you’ll see and feel the evidence that you are making great progress.

You can begin to build good habits today. Remember to focus on just a little every day… and then repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

Do let me know how you get on.