Breaking one bad habit at a time
Dropping a single habit every six months and leaving everything else alone
Settle on one habit to break, put everything you have into it, and change nothing else that year. Adding a good habit counts as a separate project on a slower clock. The argument is that habit-breaking is itself a skill, and the only way to learn it is to break one and see what worked: substitution, going cold turkey, telling people, removing the trigger, crowding it out with something else. Written down, progress looks slow. That is why people abandon it for a full life overhaul that fails by February. Compounding is the case for the slow version: a decade of this is twenty habits changed and almost nothing regained.
Who backs it
Sorted by strength of stance
- Naval RavikantDoes it
Angel investor · AngelList and the Naval podcast
Every six months he tries to break one bad habit, and every six months to a year tries to pick up a good one. Everything else stays static in the meantime. You never learn to break habits by reading about it, he says, only by breaking one.
Source: The Tim Ferriss Show transcript: Naval Ravikant
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Habit entry · notes paraphrased from cited sources, quoted excerpts copied from the transcript they link to. Not medical advice. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by anyone listed. How this works.