“What we do now echoes in eternity.”
― Marcus Aurelius
The world around us can get out of control. Nobody follows the exact paths they expect to take in life, and being detoured against our will is the rule, not the exception. In such a life of change, obstacles, pain, and surprises, our habits are there for us. By developing and practicing good habits each day, you affirm that you do have control over the very core of your life in the midst of the chaos.
Many people understand the importance of friends and family for external support, but not as many recognize the importance of their habits for internal support. Even with world class external support, many still fall into despair because they lack internal support.
Nobody else can live your life for you, no matter how much they love you.
Healthy habitual behaviors stabilize us in stressful times. If you don’t have a habitual base of self-supporting behaviors, what do you think happens when your world is rocked? Habits are known wins, and a distressed mind wants and needs nothing more than a known win. If you don’t have an internal foundation of good habits, then you will seek the only thing within your reach—bad habits.
Whereas good habits help us recover from hard times, bad habits can deepen negative spirals. This is as blunt as it is important: habits are the most leveraged aspect of our lives, and we get to choose them.
When I finished writing my first book, Mini Habits, in 2013, I predicted that it would be successful, purely on the strength of the strategy. I was right, as it became an international bestseller in 17 languages.
Mini Habits has changed thousands of lives all over the world. Six years later, this book and its strategy are even better. I don’t mean it in an incremental sense, like with my second and third books. Elastic Habits takes a bigger step forward for habit formation than Mini Habits, not necessarily because it is more revolutionary (though it may be), but because it is complete.
You’re going to encounter ideas, physical tools, and strategies in this book that you never have encountered before. If mini habits are fun, rewarding, and effective, then elastic habits are super fun, extra rewarding, and paradigm-shifting. Elastic Habits is more than the evolution of Mini Habits: it re-thinks how to approach habits. It takes the base strategy of Mini Habits, maintaining all of its proven benefits, and adds the superpower of elasticity. I’m so excited to tell you more, but first, let me tell you about the experiment I did to test this strategy.
Since I was a kid, I’ve been on the “I’ll just watch the movie” end of the work ethic spectrum. Whether it was from birth (nature) or video game training (nurture Halo 3), I did not like to work. Thus, I’m a different type of author from the ones people are used to reading in this genre. I’m not some super-elite achiever telling people how they can be awesome just like me (!).
It would be generous to say I have an average work ethic, even now. But what I lack in work ethic, I make up for by using the very best strategies. The nice thing about winning strategies is that they help “lazy” people like me and natural world-beaters alike. Great strategies are scalable to all levels. As such, the strategies in this book can benefit anyone, whether they’re at the top of the proverbial mountain, at rock bottom, or somewhere in between.
About the time I graduated high school, I gained interest in doing something useful with my life. What a pesky internal conflict that turned out to be! With my lazy disposition and bad habits, I struggled to take useful actions. My entire teenage body resisted productivity, as if doing my homework would irreparably harm me. My desire to become someone greater outmatched my behavioral capacity to do so, causing significant frustration and inner angst. I needed answers.
First, I ran into the typical “get motivated” and “just do it” advice. It didn’t work for me. Setting normal goals didn’t work. My only reliable skill, it seemed, was finding an excuse to quit before I made meaningful progress in areas that mattered to me. I knew what I needed to do, but couldn’t get myself to do it. I still needed answers.
After 10 years of mostly running in place, I stumbled upon the mini habits idea, which changed my behavior and my life. I finally found a strategy to take me where I wanted to go. After my success with the strategy, I excitedly wrote the Mini Habits book to share it with others.
Five years later, I had the idea for elastic habits. I had done well with mini habits, but one day I asked myself why my daily goal always had to be the same. Why couldn’t my goals morph to match my needs each day? I wanted to explore this idea, but there was a problem.
I had already formed good habits with Mini Habits, and those once-elusive behaviors had become easy to do. That’s the beauty of habit! But I had a new idea to test (this book), and I wanted to know if it could help me, even if I was at rock bottom. I was doing well, so I needed to wreck my life to find out.
When others were making the New Year’s Resolutions that were destined to fail a month later, I decided to do the opposite. I would purposely fail for a month and a half to start the year, and then (try to) emerge from it like a dragon out of a volcano. I called it “the slump.” It worked. Good or bad habits won’t go away permanently, but by abstaining from them for a month or two, they will go dormant from lack of activation. Mine sure did.
45 Days of Misery
I stopped exercising. I ate unhealthy food. I drank a lot more alcohol than usual. I gambled at local casinos frequently and stayed up late. I spent most of every day on the couch watching TV. In many ways, I lived the opposite life of the one I wanted. I indulged in every craving, and said no to every inclination to invest in myself.
The mental side effects were shocking, and worse than I expected. It didn’t take long for me to start thinking terrible things about who I was and how little I was worth. Even though I knew this was a purposeful and temporary experiment, it didn’t matter. The more you do something, the more it defines you.
After just three weeks, I felt defeated. Hope was gone. The slump had penetrated my soul. It saddened me to think of how many others have spiraled into and from this position. Once your spirit breaks, it’s shocking how easy it is to decline.
Here’s what happened to me physically: I gained 10 pounds of fat, something I had never done before in my life, let alone in a single month. I couldn’t sleep. My back was tight and spasmed constantly from poor couch posture. I had debilitating tension headaches and had to go to urgent care three times.
Most surprising of all, I was the most stressed out I’ve ever been in my life. Both of my eyelids twitched constantly (which continued for months). Doing nothing is somehow the most stressful lifestyle. I felt as if I would die if I did this much longer. Inactivity, poor sleep, and poor nutrition were a three-headed monster that drained my vigor; my brain and body seemed to erode at the cellular level.
I purposely “slumped” to become a lethargic, depressed, unmotivated, sickly person. Mission accomplished (sad face). Emotionally, I was in a bad place. Physically, I was in a bad place. It wasn’t fun.
After living on the couch for more than a month, even light exercise was daunting. It’s not always the lack of desire that stops us (I wanted to exercise); sometimes it’s the lack of hope, belief, and self-trust that saps our energy and convinces us we can’t do it. I felt that. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to exercise once my slump ended.
From this experiment, it was clear to me why the people who most need to change are often the ones who most struggle to do it. After the experiment, I felt overwhelmed and incapable of change. I genuinely wondered if I had fallen too far. The weight of all the work I knew I needed to do to get back to my normal self (let alone grow further) was on my slumped, stress-tightened shoulders.
You might think I’m embellishing this story, but take a moment to consider the actual impact of not taking care of yourself for 45 days in a row. It’s rough. I had the freedom to stay home and really let myself go, leaning into self-destruction. The negative impact of poor living compounds daily in much the same way that good habits do, only for the worse. I was a shell of myself, weak in every sense of the word.1
The Recovery
I broke out of the slump successfully using the strategies and tools in this book. The elasticity of my habits helped me mend my broken wings at a slow, flexible pace. It gave me the opportunity to try flying at full speed on any given day. It supported me without insulting my potential, a rare but inspiring combination.
Even when I couldn’t fly as high as I wished, I still achieved victory every day. As these victories began to stack, I started to remember where I was, who I was, before I started the slump.
While the slump took a toll on me—thank God my eyelids finally stopped twitching and my back has recovered—the experience confirmed that the strategy I’m about to share with you is the real deal. Not only did I come out of the slump successfully, but in the second month of my “dragon out of the volcano” recovery plan, I began eclipsing what I had ever accomplished in my five years with Mini Habits (and that transformation itself was massive!). I continue to soar to even greater heights with my elastic habits, and very soon, you can too.
We’ve made a false assumption about our personal growth—that it’s all up to us. It’s up to us to get motivated to do what matters. It’s up to us to find the will to create positive change in our lives. We assume (and are told) that success is born from heroic effort, but don’t ever tell that to a soaring bird.
Most birds maintain flight by flapping their wings to create lift. A relatively small subset of birds know of a better way. Soaring birds can fly and even gain elevation by holding their outstretched wings in place. Common soaring birds that you may have seen include seagulls, hawks, pelicans, eagles, and vultures.
There are two environmental phenomena that allow soaring birds to fly without flapping their wings: thermals and updrafts.
Updrafts happen commonly at mountain ridges. When wind hits the side of a ridge, the air has nowhere to go but up. This rising air under the wings of a soaring bird is enough to maintain or increase their elevation.
Thermals are pockets of air a couple of degrees warmer (or more) than the surrounding air. We’ve all heard that heat rises, and this is the case with thermals, as they are columns of warm(er), rising air. They, too, can support a soaring bird.
Any time you see a bird flying in a circular pattern without flapping its wings, you can be assured that it is a soaring bird and has found a thermal. The bird can circle around the column of air, effortlessly gliding higher and higher. Audubon, a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting birds, says, “Thermal riding requires precise body positioning to stay in the sweet spots that let vultures and all other raptors soar without flapping—a debilitating energy drain.”2
By using thermals and updrafts, soaring birds rarely have to flap their wings, saving them a lot of energy. These are my kind of birds, because they’re possibly lazy, but definitely smart fliers.3
We’ve all tried flapping our proverbial wings to exhaustion before. But have we found the best thermals and updrafts of life? If we can learn to put ourselves in advantageous positions as soaring birds do, we can fly higher in life with less effort.
In this book, you’ll learn how to…
Let’s get started. This book will read as fast as a peregrine falcon.