Try These 3 Habits for One Month and You Will be Thunderstruck

One of the weirdest things I did as a kid was stay up late and binge watch infomercials. I loved the relentless positivity and the non-stop barrage of everyone’s problems being solved at the Slap of a Chop. They weren’t all great but the best of the best were transcendent.

To be in that league, an infomercial had to feature an exquisite kicker. By kicker, I mean the jaw-dropping reduction in price and doubling (or tripling!!) of value the producers would unleash on your senses within the last 60 seconds of the spot. The entire time, they’ve been priming you with the $29.95 price point (come on, it’s over $110 in value) only to cut that to a nickel shy of $20 and offer you twice as many super absorbent sponges or cans of spray-able rubber. I’m proud to say that I never bought any of these life-altering goods (#FrugalFromTheWomb) but a masterfully executed kicker would tempt my willpower like nothing else.

In honor of the hundreds of hours I spent baring witness to the Popeils and the Mayses of the world, here’s my version of the kicker:  I actually only want you to try 2 habits for the next month! If you were on the fence about a trifecta of DadBod busting tactics, you have to give me a chance if I’m cutting the effort required by 33%!

In exchange for me cutting the list by a third, I’m asking you to do some homework before we talk about the 2 habits. I’ve read 67 self-improvement books in the last three years. Many were good, a few were fantastic, and they all had exercises they asked their readers to complete. I’m asking you to commit to the single most useful exercise I read in any of these books. It’s from First Things First by Stephen Covey and it transformed my life. It requires you to put serious thought into two questions. Fortunately, they are fascinating to ponder:

#1. What single thing, if done consistently and tremendously well would have the biggest positive impact on your career?

#2. What single thing, if done consistently and tremendously well would have the biggest positive impact on your personal life?

You are forbidden from spending a single moment in thought about how difficult something would be to do or how long it would take to develop a particular skill. This is your grown-up chance to day dream about super powers.

Make a long list for each question. At least 15 options for both or you’re not thinking big enough or hard enough.

Once you’ve exhausted your brain on both topics, start to whittle the lists down. This is the most fun/most difficult part because you eventually have to end up with only one thing for each category. There should be absolutely no doubt in your mind about whether the two things you end up with would yield gigantic improvements in your day to day life. If there is, you haven’t found the right items yet. It took me about two days to come up with the lists and another day or so to narrow them down.

If you’re the type of person who always guesses the surprise twist in a movie 30-45 minutes before the end, first of all, just stop it, you are draining the happiness out of the planet. Secondly, you probably saw what was coming as soon as I asked you to do the homework:  The two items on your list are your guaranteed, sure-fire, can’t miss, thunderstruck-inducing habits that you need to try for the next month.

Now WAIT, I’m begging you, before you groan internally (or audibly) about how you can’t just wake up tomorrow and start doing these two things at a high level on a daily basis, take 60 seconds to reflect on how powerful identifying these two things is. More than any other two consistent practices, these two habits will pay the biggest dividends in your daily life and in the lives of those around you.

Make it your mission to take a significant step toward ingraining both of them in the next 30 days. Pour every ounce of spare mental energy, physical energy, juice, motivation, and whatever else you can muster into establishing some version of these things as a routine.

Eliminate as many distractions as possible for the next month. No TV. No trips to the bar. This isn’t a permanent change, this is 30 sunrises and sunsets. Do something each and every day that contributes to establishing these habits. If one of your habits is meditation, meditate for 10 minutes every single day. If it’s exercising, exercise for 30 minutes for 30 days in a row. If it’s reading, read a fascinating book for 30 minutes every single day for the next month (email me at DestroyYourDadBod@gmail.com if you can’t find a fascinating book and I will find one for you, I promise).

The mixed blessing about being walking habit machines is that our brains are hard-wired to develop habits and once they do, they are very, very difficult to erase. Use this to your advantage. Trust me when I tell you that you don’t have to go from 0 to 60 overnight.

A quote from a fantastic book, The One Thing by Gary Keller drives the point home: “The trick to success is to choose the right habit and to bring just enough discipline to establish it. That’s it.”

If you chose the right habits, you will have no problem finding motivation for a 30-day push. You have so much to gain from pursuing these habits and literally nothing to lose.