The Proven, Reasonable and Totally Unsexy Secret to Success
If you make some small changes to your routine you could turn your most ambitious goals into your new normal.
"Lifestyle creep," is our tendency to buy bigger, better, and nicer things as our income rises.
Your normal lifestyle will creep up slowly and goods that were once seen as a luxury will gradually become a necessity.
What was once out of reach will become your new normal.
Lifestyle creep describes a very reliable way that human behavior changes over the long term.
What if we adapted this concept to the rest of our lives?
What if we trusted that goals, like adding more muscle or earning more money, or getting better grades, would come as a natural side effect of improving our normal routines?
This idea of slightly adjusting your habits until behaviors and results that were once out of reach become your new normal is a concept James Clear calls “habit creep.”
Here‘s how to practice "Habit Creep":
#1 Increase Your Performance by a Little Bit Each Day
Add a very small amount to your standard behavior.
If your standard day requires you to walk 8,000 steps, adjust it to 8,100. You can apply this logic to nearly any area of life.
#2 Change Your Environment to Remove Small Distractions and Barriers
All sorts of things we do each day are a response to the environment we live in.
We eat cookies because they are on the counter.
We pick up our phones because someone sends us a text.
If you change your environment in small ways - hide the cookies in the pantry, leave the phone in another room while you work - then your actions change as well.
Imagine if you made one positive environment change each week.
Where would your life creep to by the end of the year?