Superhuman by Habit summary

Building new habits is like cooking. Before you turn on the stove, you need to pick out your ingredients. Similarly, before you can start implementing your habits, you need to determine what they are. 

Choosing a habit is the first step in your self-improvement journey. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of positive habits you can borrow from others – from the money habits of self-made billionaires to the reading habits of your professors and mentors. But while copying successful people’s favorite habits can work in some cases, you should ultimately identify and build habits that are unique to you. There are several ways to do this. 

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither are habits. Creating habits that give you superhuman powers will take more than an overnight effort, so prepare yourself for the long haul. But how exactly do you build a habit, and what can you do to help yourself stick with it?

The first thing to grasp about building habits is that at the heart of every habit lies a trigger – an action or situation that prompts you to engage in your habitual behavior. Take brushing your teeth, for example. Its triggers are waking up in the morning or getting ready for bed at night. The goal is to align your habit with a trigger so that it becomes an automatic response. 

Tired of being a couch potato or a junk food hoarder? Want to hit the hay at the right time? Fed up with having the energy of a deflated balloon? In that case, it’s high time you adopted some healthy habits. 

Let’s start with eating healthy foods. Good food comes with a boatload of benefits. Not only will you enjoy a longer lifespan and higher quality of life, but you’ll also have more motivation to build other positive habits. To start your habit of eating healthy, avoid getting caught up with fancy diet plans. Instead, focus on removing just a few harmful ingredients from your daily meals, like refined sugars and processed carbohydrates, and swapping them with healthier alternatives. It can also help to plan your meals, so your fridge is packed with nutritious ingredients when you get hungry. 

Ever come home to a cluttered living space strewn with dirty laundry and scattered papers? Did you look around happily, or immediately sink into a sour mood? A physical mess often leads to a mental mess, which is why building organization habits is essential. 

One of the top organization habits you can get started on is daily imperfect cleaning. Yes, that’s right: imperfect! Maintaining a state of utmost cleanliness usually requires a Herculean effort – and, let’s be honest, who has the time or energy for that? Instead of targeting perfection, settle on a more realistic level of tidiness that’s easier to achieve. Then, twice a day, clean just a little to maintain that level. 

Say you have an important report that’s due today. But after typing two words into your document, you’re scrolling away on social media. You’re eager to get your work done, but you’re just not feeling very productive at the moment. 

That’s where productivity habits come into the picture. There are lots of effective strategies to build productivity habits, but we’ll focus on just two here.