7 Tiny Habits That Lead to Huge Results

The way I think about personal development and designing the life I want to live is very similar to the way I think about investing.

Imagine that every choice you make in life is associated with a "bucket." Brushing your teeth goes in the "personal hygiene bucket." Working on your novel goes in the "writing" or "creativity" bucket. Going to the gym goes in the "health" bucket. And so you have these five or six or 10 primary buckets that make up how you live your life: Work, Creativity, Health, Sleep, Social Life, Family, etc. 

Whenever you spend time doing something, anything, that is a time you are investing in that "bucket." This is a very simple way to visualize the concept of practice time and the "10,000 hours it takes to master something." The more time you put into a bucket, the more you are investing. The more you invest, the more you "have." And in theory, the more you have of that skill, the better you are.

Where a lot of people go wrong, whether it be with their own goals or even the menial tasks that tend to occupy a workplace, is they feel like the penny doesn't matter. We think that the tiniest of tasks or habits don't matter.

But just like investing, over time those pennies add up.

Every little choice does matter because every choice is time (money) in a "bucket."

If you want to make big changes in your life, or accomplish big goals, or do big things, then you have to realize the importance of the tiny details along the way. After all, a journey is comprised of 1,000 little steps.

1. Wake up when you say you're going to wake up.

Setting the alarm is only half the battle. The real purpose of setting an alarm and then getting out of bed when it goes off is to keep that first promise of the day. When you set that alarm the night before, you are making a promise that you will get up at that time. If you then wake up and ignore it, you are starting your day on the wrong foot. You've broken the first promise to yourself.

This isn't about getting up on time. This is about practicing the habit of doing what you say you're going to do. And what better way to practice than first thing every morning?

2. Write down 10 ideas per day.

This is a habit I stole from James Altucher on Quora. Since implementing it into my life, I now have the tough challenge of choosing from too many ideas. 

Coming up with great ideas requires muscle--the act of creating actionable ideas stretches and flexes that muscle in a way that keeps it healthy and fresh. Carry a journal with you, or make use of the notepad on your phone and, throughout the day, jot down ideas that come to mind. There is something about writing your ideas down that makes the brain feel like the idea was acknowledged. 

Do this for a couple days and you'll see. You'll be swimming in great ideas.

3. Eat a healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I can't stress this enough. There is always time to eat, and if there isn't time to eat then something is out of balance and you've got bigger problems coming. The reason why making time to eat is so important is because personal health comes above everything else. If you don't, then at some point you're going to have to play damage control and that's going to be even more of a challenge. It's a lot easier to be preventative with your health rather than to be reactionary. 

During breakfast, use that time to read. During lunch, use that time to catch up with someone, maybe make it a business lunch. During dinner, see your loved ones, your friends, and family. It isn't that big of a time investment, but it goes a long way to keeping you healthy and free of stress. 

4. Read for 30 minutes every day.

People vastly underestimate how quickly you can get through a book. Twenty to 30 minutes of reading per day can get you through an average-length book in about two weeks. That's two books per month, 24 books in a year. Imagine how much more you would know if you read 24 more books in a year.

Thirty minutes is not a lot of time. You could do that on the train. You could do that while waiting in line at the grocery store. Maybe you have to piecemeal 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there, but 30 minutes of reading per day is essential to keeping your brain fresh and the knowledge flowing. After all, if you're ever stuck on a project, creative or not, the first question I would ask is, "What are you reading?"

Always be studying. Make time to read.

5. Get back in your body.

Physical health is crucial to maintaining a clear head and an open mind. Especially if your work involves staring at a screen for eight to 10 hours per day, it is essential that you take at least 30 minutes to an hour to get back in your body--whether that's through yoga, the gym, boxing, running, a long walk, etc.

This goes back to the idea that doing a little bit each day to prevent any health concerns from arising is a far more effective strategy than having to fix everything once you're already off the deep end.

And if you need proof, well: "Those who exercise regularly are better at creative thinking. This result was determined by Leiden cognitive psychologist, Lorenza Colzato. She determined that regular exercisers fared better on creativity tests than did non-exercisers."

6. Meditate for 15 minutes.

Call this whatever you'd like, be it meditation or sitting quietly or journaling. The point is, you need to make time to get in touch with your thoughts. 

Aside from the fact that we know meditation is a popular habit among the outrageously successful, I can tell you first-hand that no daily habit has had a bigger impact on my life than meditation.

The point of this habit is to be aware of what is bothering you, or what you're feeling good about, or what needs to be addressed so that you can get a clear sense of what you need to do next. It's almost like seeing into the future. If you can address the problem before it spirals out of control, you've saved yourself a lot of time and energy. Or, if you find yourself feeling great and overly ambitious, now might be a good time to take more risks.

Check in with yourself. Fifteen minutes each day isn't asking that much, is it?

7. Reflect before bed.

This is my favorite habit because you can see its impact the very next day.

Each night before bed, take five minutes to reflect. Jot down in a journal (writing here is important) a few things that went particularly well, and then write down a few things you'd like to do differently tomorrow.

The reason why this is so effective is it really keeps you honest with yourself. It allows you to take a moment and pat yourself on the back for the most immediate accomplishment, and it also keeps you on a growth edge, always looking for the next way to improve.

Without reflection, you have no real direction as to where to head next.

Five minutes before bed is all you need.

Screw Finding Your Passion

Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?” You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football. You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster.

Nobody told you to do it, you just did it. You were led merely by your curiosity and excitement.

And the beautiful thing was, if you hated baseball, you just stopped playing it. There was no guilt involved. There was no arguing or debate. You either liked it, or you didn’t.

And if you loved looking for bugs, you just did that. There was no second-level analysis of, “Well, is looking for bugs really what I should be doing with my time as a child? Nobody else wants to look for bugs, does that mean there’s something wrong with me? How will looking for bugs affect my future prospects?”

There was no bullshit. If you liked something, you just did it.

Today I received approximately the 11,504th email this year from a person telling me that they don’t know what to do with their life. And like all of the others, this person asked me if I had any ideas of what they could do, where they could start, where to “find their passion.”

And of course, I didn’t respond. Why? Because I have no fucking clue. If you don’t have any idea what to do with yourself, what makes you think some jackass with a website would? I’m a writer, not a fortune teller.

But more importantly, what I want to say to these people is this: that’s the whole point — “not knowing” is the whole fucking point. Life is all about not knowing, and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. All of it. And it’s not going to get any easier just because you found out you love your job cleaning septic tanks or you scored a dream gig writing indie movies.

The common complaint among a lot of these people is that they need to ‘find their passion.’

I call bullshit. You already found your passion, you’re just ignoring it. Seriously, you’re awake 16 hours a day, what the fuck do you do with your time? You’re doing something, obviously. You’re talking about something. There’s some topic or activity or idea that dominates a significant amount of your free time, your conversations, your web browsing, and it dominates them without you consciously pursuing it or looking for it.

It’s right there in front of you, you’re just avoiding it. For whatever reason, you’re avoiding it. You’re telling yourself, “Oh well, yeah, I love comic books but that doesn’t count. You can’t make money with comic books.”

Fuck you, have you even tried?

The problem is not a lack of passion for something. The problem isproductivity. The problem is perception. The problem is acceptance.

The problem is the, “Oh, well that’s just not a realistic option,” or “Mom and Dad would kill me if I tried to do that, they say I should be a doctor” or “That’s crazy, you can’t buy a BMW with the money you make doing that.”

The problem isn’t passion. It’s never passion.

It’s priorities.

And even then, who says you need to make money doing what you love? Since when does everyone feel entitled to love every fucking second of their job? Really, what is so wrong with working an OK normal job with some cool people you like, and then pursuing your passion in your free time on the side? Has the world turned upside-down or is this not suddenly a novel idea to people?

Look, here’s another slap in the face for you: every job sucks sometimes. There’s no such thing as some passionate activity that you will never get tired of, never get stressed over, never complain about. It doesn’t exist. I am living my dream job (which happened by accident, by the way. I never in a million years planned on this happening; like a kid on a playground I just went and tried it), and I still hate about 30% of it. Some days more.

Again, that’s just life.

The issue here is, once again, expectations. If you think you’re supposed to be working 70-hour work weeks and sleeping in your office like Steve Jobs and loving every second of it, you’ve been watching too many shitty movies. If you think you’re supposed to wake up every single day dancing out of your pajamas because you get to go to work, then you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid. Life doesn’t work like that. It’s justunrealistic. There’s a thing most of us need called balance.

I have a friend who, for the last three years, has been trying to build anonline business selling whatever. It hasn’t been working. And by not working, I mean he’s not even launching anything. Despite years of “work” and saying he’s going to do this or that, nothing actually ever gets done.

What does get done is when one of his former co-workers comes to him with a design job to create a logo or design some promotional material for an event. Holy shit, he’s all over that like flies on fresh cow shit.

And he does a great job! He stays up to 4:00 AM losing himself working on it and loving every second of it.

But then two days later it’s back to, “Man, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

I meet so many people like him. He doesn’t need to find his passion. His passion already found him. He’s just ignoring it. He just refuses to believe it’s viable. He is just afraid of giving it an honest-to-god try.

It’s like a nerdy kid walking onto a playground and saying, “Well, bugs are really cool, but NFL players make more money, so I should force myself to play football every day,” and then coming home and complaining that he doesn’t like recess.

And that’s bullshit. Everybody likes recess. The problem is that he’s arbitrarily choosing to limit himself based on some bullshitty ideas he got into his head about success and what he’s supposed to do.

Another email I get all the time is from people wanting advice on how to become a writer.

And my answer is the same: I have no fucking idea.

As a kid, I would write short stories in my room for fun. As a teenager, I would write music reviews and essays about bands I loved and then show them to nobody. Once the internet came around, I spent hours upon hours on forums writing multi-page posts about inane topics – everything from guitar pickups to the causes of the Iraq War.

I never considered writing as a potential career. I never even considered it a hobby or passion. To me, the things I wrote about were my passion: music, politics, philosophy. Writing was just something I did because I felt like it.

And when I had to go looking for a career I could fall in love with, I didn’t have to look far. In fact, I didn’t have to look at all. It chose me, in a way. It was already there. Already something I was doing every day, since I was a kid, without even thinking about it.

Because here’s another point that might make a few people salty: If you have to look for what you’re passionate about, then you’re probably not passionate about it at all.

If you’re passionate about something, it will already feel like such an ingrained part of your life that you will have to be reminded by people that it’s not normal, that other people aren’t like that.

It didn’t occur to me that writing 2,000 word posts on forums was something nobody else considered fun. It never occurred to my friend that designing a logo is something that most people don’t find easy or fun. To him, it’s so natural that he can’t even imagine it being otherwise. And that’s why it’s probably what he really should be doing.

A child does not walk onto a playground and say to herself, “How do I find fun?” She just goes and has fun.

If you have to look for what you enjoy in life, then you’re not going to enjoy anything.

And the real truth is that you already enjoy something. You already enjoy many things. You’re just choosing to ignore them.

Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect

Zach Hambrick has always been fascinated by exceptional performance, or what he calls “the extremes of human capabilities.” Growing up, he’d devour Guinness World Records, noting the feats it described and picturing himself proudly posting in its pages. By the time he reached college, though, he’d moved on to a new obsession: becoming a golf pro. “I was very serious about it,” he told me. “I practiced religiously. It was very deliberate practice.” Every day, for hours, he’d be out swinging and putting. He expected to find himself on his way to glory. Except it didn’t quite­ work out that way. Instead, young Zach was confronted with an uncomfortable truth: “I just wasn’t very good.” He saw other students, even kids around town—many of them, far less devoted and far less driven—and many of them played a better game. When he tried out for the college team, he didn’t even come close to making it. “I thought, What is the deal here?”

This was Hambrick’s introduction to an age-old debate: nature versus nurture, genetics versus effort. We’ve been having it long before we knew what DNA was. Right around the same time Gregor Mendel was messing about with his famous peas, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, was positing that genius tends to run in families. Take almost any enterprise and find its most famous voices, he argued, and you’re led to family trees of great accomplishment, much like his own. (He would take this notion to an extreme with his eugenics program.) And, while that view hasn’t survived in its extreme form, the basic question still guides modern research—not nature versus nurture so much as just how much nature, and just how much nurture?

After finishing college, Hambrick began graduate work in psychology at Georgia Tech, with Timothy Salthouse, looking at aging and expertise in older adults. Despite his failures at golf, Hambrick was still very much of the belief that, given enough effort, you could reach excellence. Maybe golf just hadn’t been the right thing for him. In 1996, when the Olympics came to Atlanta, the students had to leave campus to make way for the athletes and visitors, and Salthouse suggested that Hambrick spent a few months at Florida State University. There, he ended up working with Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology. A couple of years earlier, Ericsson and Neil Charness had published a provocative paper arguing that training and so-called deliberate practice could describe performance differences that had been previously ascribed to innate talent. “The traditional view of talent, which concludes that successful individuals have special innate abilities and basic capacities, is not consistent with the reviewed evidence,” Ericsson and Charness wrote. “Differences between expert and less accomplished performers reflect acquired knowledge and skills or physiological adaptations affected by training, with the only confirmed exception being height.” In other words, training was everything. Hambrick could have become a world-class golfer with enough practice. Maybe he’d given up too soon.

It’s a provocative argument, and one that Ericsson still espouses over two decades later, having made a single modification to his list of exceptions: body size joined height as one of only two areas with any possible genetic influence. When we spoke recently, I presented him with multiple papers from different labs, from studies on the heredity of talent in twins to genetics papers on specific gene variants implicated in performance. But he held firm to his argument. He told me he had yet to encounter someone presenting him with evidence that anything other than practice matters. (He did, in a later conversation, add that the age at which one begins practicing can make a difference in someone’s achievement level.) “I have no problem conceptually with this idea of genetic differences,” he said when we first spoke, “but nothing I’ve seen has convinced me this is actually the case. There’s compelling evidence that if it’s length of bones, that cannot be explained by training. We know you can’t influence diameter of bones. But that’s really it.”

If that’s true, it means that the sky is the limit, especially if you’re dealing with areas other than athletics, where the length of bones can offer no competitive edge. Follow your dreams and, with enough training—an average of ten thousand hours, as the famous formulation goes—you can reach them, whether they involve golf or poetry. (It’s important to note here that Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized Ericsson’s work in his book “Outliers,” takes a much more nuanced position and has argued that practice isn’t sufficient. “I could play chess for 100 years and I’ll never be a grandmaster,” he has written. “The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest.”)

But Hambrick obviously didn’t become a golf pro. And, if you look closely at ten thousand hours as an average, rather than absolute, number, you can start to see a problem with it. If, as shown even in Ericsson’s own data, some people require fewer hours and some require more to reach an identical point, doesn’t that imply that some individual difference other than practice is at play? When I brought this issue up with Hambrick, he noted that, in his introductory psychology course, some of the students who study very little do better than the ones who study a lot.

So I asked Ericsson if, given all the advances in genetics research and all the work on the science of expertise and élite performance that has taken place since his original formulation, he still believed in the preëminent importance of training. Do natural, heritable abilities really mean nothing? If, for instance, he himself could choose my trainer and design the perfect training plan, could I become a world-class pianist? (I chose this example since I played for many years in my youth and easily have ten thousand hours in hand.) At first, Ericsson demurred, refusing a straight yes-or-no answer in favor of asking questions about my past. Why hadn’t I been better as a child? Perhaps I wasn’t motivated? No, I assured him, I was. Perhaps my teacher wasn’t qualified? No, I responded. She was a former professor at a music conservatory in Russia. Maybe, I countered, I’m just not particularly talented at the piano. He refused to accept that and ultimately blamed my teacher. Clearly, she didn’t provide the right deliberate practice. I’d be in a different profession today if only she’d been better.

Hambrick blames something else. That summer in Florida, in 1996, he and Ericsson grew close. He remembers meeting often at Ericsson’s F.S.U. office, going to his house to peruse his book collection, taking in F.S.U. basketball games on later visits. “It was fantastic. Wonderful, inspiring conversations,” he recalls. Together with one of Ericsson’s own students, Len Hill, they decided to tackle the golf question head-on. Hambrick spent weeks tracking down data for P.G.A. tour stats and running analyses to determine how the pros reached their level of success. The work continued when he returned to Atlanta and even went on into the first years of his professorship at Michigan State University. But the analyses weren’t turning out quite as expected—training was not explaining nearly as much as it should. So, while the work languished in an unpublished state, Hambrick began to focus more and more on the other possible components of expert accomplishment. Of course, training was important—but how important? “I started to ask, Well, wait a second, can these strong claims about the primacy of practice actually hold up—is there the evidence to back it up?” The more he researched, the more he concluded that the answer was no. No matter how much he had practiced as a teenager, he would never have reached the P.G.A. tour. Of course, he’d known that all along, on some level—after all, he quit golf. People do have natural ceilings to their talent in any given area, and after a certain point, their success arose from things other than deliberate practice.

In one study, for instance, Hambrick looked at pianists and measured their working memory, or the ability to keep chunks of information in mind and accessible for short periods of time. In the past, working-memory capacity has been found to be heritable. In his sample, it predicted success even when you accounted for the effects of practice; pianists with better working memory were better at sight reading—and increased practice did not alter the effect. When he looked back to one of the most frequently studied groups in expertise research, chess players, he found that, in addition to working or short-term memory, three more components of cognitive ability—fluid reasoning, comprehension knowledge, and processing speed, all abilities that are, to some extent, heritable—were related to performance. This was especially true of younger and less experienced players. If you’re naturally better, you don’t have to practice quite as much to get good.

So how much did practice actually explain? In a 2014 meta-analysis that looked specifically at the relationship between deliberate practice and performance in music, games like chess, sports, education, and other professions, Hambrick, and his team found a relationship that was even more complex than they had expected. For some things, like games, practice explained about a quarter of the variance in expertise. For music and sports, the explanatory power accounted for about a fifth. But for education and professions like computer science, military-aircraft piloting, and sales, the effect ranged from small to tiny. For all of these professions, you obviously need to practice, but natural abilities matter more.

What’s more, the explanatory power of practice fell even further when Hambrick took an exact level of expertise into account. In sports—one of the areas in which deliberate practice seems to make the most difference—it turned out that the more advanced the athlete, the less of a role practice plays. Training an average athlete for a set number of hours yields far more results than training an elite athlete, which, in turn, yields greater results than training a super-élite athlete. Put differently, someone like me is going to improve a great deal with even a few hundred hours of training. But within an Olympic team, tiny differences in performance are unlikely to be the result of training: these athletes train together, with the same coach, day in and day out. Those milliseconds come from somewhere else. Some may be due to the fact that genetic differences can account for some of the response to training. At Stanford’s ELITE study, which looks at the most accomplished athletes in the world, Euan Ashley, a professor of medicine and genetics, is studying how an Olympian’s body may respond differently to a given training regimen. Some changes are due to genetic variants that may affect blood transport or oxygen uptake or fat metabolism, or any other number of factors. Some are due to sheer luck—How much sleep did you get? How are you feeling? And some, of course, are due to hours of training. But at the top of the top of the top, the power of additional training falls off sharply.

So where else, exactly, do performance differences come from? While Hambrick’s work has been focussed more explicitly on practice and genetics, David Lubinski, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, has been approaching the question from a slightly different angle: through what’s called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a longitudinal study of the lives of students who, by the age of thirteen, had scored in the top one percent of mathematical reasoning ability and were then selected to take part in an enriched educational environment. (The study, co-directed for many years by Lubinski and his wife, Vanderbilt’s education school dean, Camilla Benbow, was described in detail in a recent article in Nature.) It’s a crucial supplement to work like Hambrick’s; the data you get from close observation of the same sample and the same individuals over time can answer questions other approaches can’t. “What kinds of practice are more effective? What approaches more effective for some people than others?” Hambrick asks. “We need all the pieces to the puzzle to maximize people’s potential. Lubinski’s work on mathematically precocious youth is an essential piece.”

Now, more than four decades since the SMPY observation began, we are beginning to see some answers. Perhaps not surprisingly, kids in both the SMPY sample and an unrelated cohort of talented students identified by Duke University excel at measures like an academic accomplishment, patents, publications, academic tenure, and organizational leadership. They reach full professorship and C.E.O. status at rates far above any population norm. They were selected on nothing more than a measurable intellectual promise, and here they are.

That is not the whole story, though, as Lubinski points out. To him, the interesting finding is the striking range of abilities within this élite sample. “Individual differences in the top one percent matter,” Lubinski told me. “People think of the top one percent, whether in I.Q. or reasoning or what have you, as categorical. But that top contains one-third of the ability range you see in other samples. There is a huge amount of psychological diversity among the gifted.” Some accomplish a lot, but some, even with all their promise, end up indistinguishable from their initially less gifted counterparts. Genes give everyone a possible peak, but whether you reach that peak depends on a constellation of other factors.

Part of the difference in accomplishment, it turns out, really is due to practice, just like Ericsson argues. “What separates intellectually talented kids from their intellectual peers when it comes to actual creative advances? A lot of it is how much people are willing to work,” Lubinski told me. Some people are gifted, or “intellectually talented,” as he prefers to refer to them, but don’t want to work forty hours a week, while some want to work more than sixty hours. “That has huge implications. Chance always favors the prepared mind.” Practice, work ethic: differences that aren’t apparent at age thirteen will, in their presence or absence, become magnified by the time you hit your forties or fifties. (As it turns out, though, even work ethic may be heritable. Hambrick has recently published a study on the heritability of practice, using eight hundred pairs of twins. “Practice is actually heritable. There have now been two reports of this—ours, and one using ten thousand twins. And practice is substantially heritable.”)

Also crucially important is one of the first things that critics of studies like this point out: environment. These kids aren’t just identified young; they are then nurtured in a way others are not. How much of their success lies in opportunity? It’s a question Lubinski and Benbow have studied in some detail. In three educational–intervention studies, they have demonstrated that, if you compare intellectually talented children who have had the sorts of developmental opportunities the SMPY affords, they end up doing better in terms of measurable intellectual achievements like number of patents and publications than their intellectual peers—individuals matched on general intellectual ability—who have not had that enriched experience.

Opportunity must be there. Genes are great, but they need to have the right environment in which to flourish. You don’t just give birth to a “genius,” whether an academic or an athletic or an artistic one. You also give her the right environment, train her, encourage her, support her, challenge her, respond to her individuality. And who knows what else may ultimately matter. “All the abilities we assess, we still miss things,” Lubinski points out. Lewis Terman, the intellectual forefather of giftedness studies, famously missed two Nobel laureates in his selection. They were cut from the initial samples for not being gifted enough and never had a chance to take part in his study. “You’re tapping potential, but there’s also passion, commitment to work, people who want to do any one thing. People really vary. The diversity of human individuality is breathtaking.”

That diversity originates in our genetic code. But it becomes infinitely more complex as you add life into the mix. We cannot predict with accuracy who will become élite in a given field, but we know that genes and environment matter and that we all have different natural peaks that we can reach through application and training. Saying that training is everything may be tempting, but it’s wrong. “One of the criticisms people direct at us is that we’re killing people’s dreams,” Hambrick says. “But I think in fact it’s the contrary: the more we can know about the origins of expertise, including training but everything else, the more we can help people be their best selves.” Perhaps it’s just enough to know that no matter how many hours I spend in the pool, I won’t be Katie Ledecky. And I’m pretty sure I’m not going to become Brad Mehldau, either, even if I get a better teacher.