Uprooting Habits

“We are what we repeatedly do.”

Aristotle

Uprooting Habits: The Allegory of the Sapling and the Student

A wise teacher was taking a stroll through the forest with his young pupil and stop before a tiny tree.

“Pull up that sapling!” the teacher instructed his student, pointing to a sprout just coming up from the earth.

The youngster pulled it up easily with his fingers.

“Now pull up that one,” said the teacher indicating a more established sapling that had grown to about knee high on the boy.

With little effort the lad yanked the tree up, roots and all.

“And now this one,”  said the teacher nodding toward a more well-developed evergreen that was tall as the young pupil.

With great effort throwing all his weight and strengthened the task, using sticks and a stone he found the pry up the stubborn roots the boy finally got the tree loose.

Now the wise one said, “I’d like you to pull up this one.”

The young boy followed the teacher’s gaze which fell upon a mighty oak so tall the boy could scarcely see the top knowing the great struggle he had just had pulling up the much smaller tree he simply told his teacher, “I’m sorry but I can’t.”

“My son you have just demonstrated the power that habits will have over your entire life,” the teacher exclaimed!

The older they are, the bigger they get and the deeper the roots grow. They become harder and harder to uproot. Some get so big, with roots so deep, you might hesitate to try to uproot them.

The Rider

There’s a story about a man riding a horse Galloping quickly, it appears that he is going somewhere very important. A man standing alongside the road calls out, “Where are you going?”

The rider replies, “I don’t know. Ask the horse!”

This is the story of most people’s lives. They’re riding the horse of their habits with no idea where they’re headed. It’s time to take control of the reins and move your life in the direction of where you really wanted to go. If you’ve been living on autopilot and allowing your habits to run you I want you to understand why.

Process of Least Effort

As humans, we default to the process of least effort to accomplish any task that benefits our survival. If there is an easier way to crack a nut, say smashing it with a rock, we will build habits around getting the results we want, in this case, eating the nut that we smashed open with a rock.

Habit Feedback Loops

There is a habit feedback loop at play here that many people may not notice.

• Trigger – seeing a nut/feeling hungry
• Response – crack the nut using minimal effort, smash it with a rock.
• Reward – eat the nut satisfy your hunger.
• Result – fortification of habit. Use a rock saves energy and you get a nut to satisfy your hunger.
  
  

Note: If we want to interrupt a bad habit we need to build a little resistance between the trigger and the response stages but that is an article for another time.

Conservation of Energy

This is a great way for us to automate various repetitive daily decisions to conserve calories. Our brains use about 1/5 of our caloric intake (according to the Science Museum of Minnesota.) Think of your brain as the processor of a computer. The processor consumes an enormous amount of the power budget of your computer.

The fewer decisions we have to process the fewer calories we need to consume to execute a repetitive process. Habits allow us to execute common tasks over and over without having to dedicate much more mental processing power.

However, this tactical adaptation breaks down when it comes to managing our finances. We need to elevate those decisions above our evolutionary shortcut to laziness.

Creatures of Habit

Merriam-Webster defines habit this way “an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly completely involuntary”

If our habits are nearly involuntary, why wouldn’t we set into place a system that leads to our health and wealth or rapid financial success?

One Time Actions: Continuous Results

That is exactly what I did a few years ago. I completely changed how I spent my money and my time. I changed most of the reoccurring expenses in my life as well as the routines I spent my time on. Effectively, I set up an automated system of how my money was spent in a way that benefited my tithe and me first, not by bill collectors. 

Setting into motion this sequence of decisions has allowed me to refocus my time on things that matter more to me such as; spending quality time with my kids, focusing on my side hustle, and dating women in the hopes of one day finding a suitable partner to marry and travel the world with during my imminent financial independence.

I am confident to say “imminent” financial independence because despite the recent economic dip and the incredible plummet of the stock market and unemployment rate thanks to the Coronavirus, I am still at all-time highs in my net wealth and I don’t say net worth because your wealth is no indicator of your worth. 😉

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

I challenge you to take a serious and deep look at your reoccurring expenses and see if you can find some cost savings or if each expense truly adds commemorate happiness to your life. As you can see from my article 12 Ways I Saved 13k’s… from My Expenses Last Year I really didn’t care about a lot of things that I was spending money on. If this is the case for you, I challenge you to look at the ways you are spending your money and see if you could reallocate your money towards your financial independence and set up a better system of habits or reoccurring expenses that lead to your rapid financial independence.

Remember that the aggregation of small savings compounds into huge gains. Changing the type of dog food I bought may have only saved me a couple of hundred dollars a year but combined with the other savings on this list  12 Ways I Saved 13k’s collectively I saved enough to buy a different car with enough left over to travel to a foreign destination every year.

Of course, I choose to invest it and add that money to my perpetual money-making machine so I could continuously produce enough income to live on and compound the remainder indefinitely.

Your System

You have set up a system of habits that are leading you somewhere. Even if you have not consciously designed them to produce a certain outcome and they have accumulated to accomplish the minimum tasks required to accomplish your day. Wake up, get ready for work, practice personal hygiene, get through your workday, eat, exercise, hobbies/entertainment, and sleep. Recall our Merriam-Webster definition above.

Why not be intentional? Why not base your habits off of a goal that has been broken down and reverses engineered to lead you where you want to be with your finances, health, fitness, and relationships? If you want to know exactly how to do this just click here.