How do we adopt new habits?
New habits are adopted by creating satisfying and repeatable experiences. An habit is an habit once the action you’re achieving no longer need willpower to be done.
Adopting a new habit is a matter of time and repetition. Depending on the complexity or the amount of willpower needed, the new habit can take a week or three month to be adopted.
Adopting habits are easier for people with a Growth mindset, as they’re constantly searching for feedback and get pleasure out of changing for the better (How To Take Smart Notes - Sönke Ahrens).
Creating new habits are difficult, that’s why we need to break big changes into multiple tiny changes and embrace it step by step. Abrupt changes will need too much willpower and will inevitably lead in abandon by fatigue. This is also true for too many changes. Ones can’t break and/or adopt too many habits at the same time. Better breaking into multiple steps using the Microproductivity principle. Even though I didn’t read it, I think this what James Clear’s “Atomic Habit” book is relating to.
We do it anyway: when we’re learning new things, we make usage of a microproductivity framework to abstract things. Think of learning how to ski or how to drive: it’s about breaking each moves into little habits. And for each habit, once we’d mastered it, we start having the ability to make bigger habits from eaach using abstraction. This is how we anchor our movements.
According to How To Read A Book, The Classic Guide To Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren:
There’s no other way of forming an habit of operation than by operating
In other words, adopting habits need practice. There’s no other way. We also need to know the rules of the skills we’re developing to form strong habit to then, be able to overcome it (202106131155 Paradigm shifts comes from little steps toward a direction).