Expand the New Habit At The Beginning

When Building New Habits, it is useful to Expand the New Habit at the Beginning. Put a little more time and energy into it. Make it a more important part of your day — at first — not only to deeply establish it, but to solve the inevitable problems that will come up in your new practice.

The idea behind expanding the habit at the beginning, is simply one of experience. Efficiency comes with experience. Skill comes with experience. Ideas and imagination can come with experience. Flow comes with experience.

You need to gain as much experience as you can in as quickly as you can — with the underlying focus being long-term consistency, of course. Learn deeply, practice thoroughly, to overcome the significant hurdles at the beginning, to actually get yourself in the flow of long-term progress.

You are not just learning how to write, journal, run, lift, meditate, shoot, build a business, cook and eat clean (etc) you are learning a completely different way of thinking, doing and being. Learning to do something new, building a new habit, or completing the project all require a significant expenditure of time and energy. And no small degree of problem-solving and trouble-shooting either.

Expand the New Habit at the beginning to give yourself the time and energy to deal with these problems head on, at the beginning, doing something you are passionate about. For some, their perspective when learning to run might be two run 1km 3x/week for a couple weeks, then to increase to 1km 5x/week for a couple weeks, then 1.5km 5x/week (or something like that) and so on, gradually increasing the interval.

This is an excellent method.

For me personally, I am more of the inclination to run 4km 5x/week from week one. Then gradually varying the length of one run to increase the total weekly distance from 20km/week to 25km (one 9km run) or 31 (one 15km) and so on.

The first is to build the foundation gradually. Great method, which there is a time and place for. I like to establish the foundation as quickly as possible, so that I can enjoy the building too, and deepen the foundation as I go.

(The latter is especially possible if you have time for it, which is why for the important things, we make the time to create rapid progress when we Expand the New Habit at the Beginning.)

Notes

• One of the ways that I learned this is in the process of editing. Imagine condensing, expanding, and overall organizing 10+ years of extensive notes, writing, research, and ideas into something halfway readable (and eventually readable). It was overwhelming at first. One of the things that helped me was to dedicate deep focus on it for a time, to get some real work done on it, so that it became easier to manage.