But even if you read a thousand different ways to explain/justify/dress up "do hard things", you only need one to really click with you.
Of course, there's plenty of expensive fitness equipment gathering dust, but don't let someone else tell you "you don't need all that stuff" if it works for you. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid!
And yet the only way to win is not to play. So I work as hard as I possibly can force myself to in hopes that I’ll be able to retire as early as possible.
Any advice on how to make eating frogs easier, I’d love to hear it. I get up early, I take cold showers every day, I do HIIT workouts every other day, and I have a complex productivity system for tracking what I need to do, I ruthlessly prioritize, and I do a pretty good job and closing the laptop and not working in the evening and weekends. I hate it all and can’t wait for when I can stop all of it.
Remember to spend at least some of your time doing something for joy. Do something new. Something you're bad at. Drop it the second it's not fun anymore. Or take a trip. Ensure you're spending time on friends and family. Just waste time sometimes and don't feel bad about it. Focus on a task thats not actually the top priority but is more fun now and again.
It doesn't get easier. You pick up more tasks and harder tasks. You can make things that were once harder things easier things, but you're always going to be working hard if you're improving. Make sure you do it sustainably -- it's a marathon and not a sprint. If you rush to retire but don't build a life you want to retire to it will just make it worse.
But actually, surprisingly, things you don't initially want to do can become positive habits in a very short time period. Like, 3-5 times. Of course, the flip side is also true; I've often fallen OUT of workout habits just as easily. But at the end of the day, perfection is not the goal. You shouldn't avoid starting a new positive habit just because you know you'll probably lose the habit again. You can always pick it up once more!
Someone who is a regular gym-goer for a few years, then becomes sedentary, then picks up running for a half decade, then moves on to cycling, then falls out of the habit, is probably better off than someone who never bothers to try.
The key thing is to do/start with the same thing everyday, with slight variations in the end. Make it an autopilot routine during which you can be mentally elsewhere. Only then you may think “I have to…” and [click] it’s done before you even notice.
That's what the entire internet tells me, but it just doesn't happen to me.
Whatever it is that I wish to keep up, I have to decide to do it every time, roughly the same as I did the first couple of times.
Yes, that includes brushing the teeth.
Of course there are habitual things in my life, but I can see no common characteristics. Total time spend certainly isn't it.
Amusingly, this has made it almost trivial for me to quit smoking despite being a smoker for many years. I just never developed a habit for it, so dropping it was as simple as just not smoking.
I like to establish the habit of consistently succeeding. I feel that we often need to start with "small" successes, then gradually increase the complexity/ambition.
Before you know it, you're routinely completing pretty damn ambitious stuff.
When I was an accountant, my teacher once said "How do you eat an elephant?" (dramatic pause) "One bite at a time."
Frequently, the line between amazing achievement and wistful thinking is shutting up, turning off the "what if" part of the brain, and plowing into it.
I'm not saying people shouldn't think ahead, but smart people usually have the opposite problem of mental over-investment toward non-result-generating thoughts.