What does the greatest version of your life look like?
Do you have a mansion, a house, a cabin in the woods isolated from the world?
Are you married, single, or with a family?
Are you employed at a company or an entrepreneur? What would be your product or service? What is your dream occupation?
What do you want to be doing in your ideal life?
Take five minutes and paint a picture of your ideal life.
Visualize every sense of your ideal life.
- What do you see?
- What can you touch?
- What can you smell?
- What can you taste?
- What do you hear?
Imagine your greatest self as existing in a separate dimension, but still you.
Ask, what are the habits of the greatest version of yourself? What habits, routines, and actions got them to this point.
Imagine the day to day. This is where the habits are found.
habits determine how you spend most of your time. It takes 90 days to learn a habit, and you can steal the habits of the greatest version of yourself. The greatest version of yourself can be a composite of great habits of people you respect.
90 days
Has shown to be the average length of time to develop a new habit. This is known as “automaticity”. Taking an abnormal behavioral pattern, repeating it until it isn’t abnormal anymore. While 90 days is an average, some can form new habits in as little as 66 days. However, it takes as long as it takes, and every path is a different length.
Copy the habits of the ideal self.
Habits are not necessarily all hard to change, but is easy to forget you are pursuing changing habits.
Habit is a polite word for addiction.
Start with no more than five of your ideal self’s habit as habit goals. Consider splitting them by mind, body, and spirit.
Find a reason why
Find a compelling reason(s) why you want to become your ideal self and develop better habits. It could be from childhood pain. Use that for motivation instead of seeking external sources of motivation which is usually futile because the spirit is within and radiates outward, not the other way around.
Your new habits
Once you have determined your habits, they must be followed consistently. Reinvention is dramatic, painful, and difficult, but worth it.
If you decide to quit watching TV, consider tracking every day that you don’t watch TV. You need metrics and data for measurement. You can also take a faith-based approach and go for total abstinence. Sometimes that method isn’t available or optimal. Stats show you where you stand. Your source of truth.
Put reminders for your habits in physical and digital spaces. Do not allow goals to live only in your mind. The refrigerator and bathroom mirror are excellent for listing habit goals due to the frequency of interaction.
Digital management will work too. Evernote is fantastic, or get an application to track your habits.
Eventually your habits will become normal. Hopefully within the 21-66 day range, but for deep-rooted habits you will need more time. Upgrading yourself is always worth the pain and investment. The habits from your teenage years may not be suitable for your adults years. Habits in your 30’s may not suit your 40’s, and so on.
Upgrade yourself consistently.
The Greatest Self
Get deep into the visualization of your greatest self, the self you want to be. You could do this daily. Include visualizations in your morning and night routines if it makes sense to do so. Don’t let go of your great self. Don’t forget why you want to change, or how wonderful life will be when you do.
Whenever you’re thinking about moving against a habit goal, visualize what the greatest version of yourself would do. They wouldn’t break. Try to avoid unscheduled “luxury time” but take it if you are making mistakes on the path where you would not make mistakes before. If this does not apply, wait until your pre-scheduled time for off-path activities arrives.
Let the greatest self speak to you.
The greatest version of yourself wants you to succeed. It is easier if you listen to the voice in your head, the narration, that comes from your ambition, instead of the voice that comes from fear.
Listen to the best version of yourself and live authentic to that for 66 days (or longer) to adopt proclivities that are harmonious with your best self.
5 comments
“A habit is a polite word for an addiction.” That was powerful.
Looking back at all the habits I have accumulated and trashed, I would say for me the number lies between 30 and 66 but 66 is a good number to aim for.
5 habits seems like A LOT to instill concurrently. I would say 2 or 3 at most but I confess I do not have the greatest willpower around. I would love to hear about your personal experiences and if you have ever changed that many habits and tracked them all at once.
Excellent post.
Good points all round and yes it’s amazing how someone who is in a desperate need of change can benefit from just a handful of habit changes.
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg certainly woke me up to the fact that most of our day to day actions are done by habit. The examples you gave are habits that one wouldn’t normally think of as habits. I laughed when you listed excess Amazon spending as I have a huge problem with buying books and not reading them.
A little off topic but you say you journal every night. Have you ever practiced journaling in the morning and if so how does it compare to journaling at night?
Amazon is a tough habit to break simply for all of the affordable books that I want. I was able to head off a lot of my Amazon purchases by letting my prime lapse. It’s amazing what you’re suddenly not willing to pay for when you have to pay for shipping lol
I feel as though people say how fast time goes by all the time yet when confronted with a challenge that could change their life in a brief amount of time it is “too difficult” for them.
In fact, new year’s resolutions were set roughly 66 days before you wrote this post. I’d love to see how many made it. The ones who did are probably high on life with their new found self while everyone else seeps back into mediocrity.
My uncle wanted to stop smoking a year ago and he managed to do that this year, otherwise I have never seen one acting on his NYR.
The ones that are winning are on this website and in the manosphere.