“Get smart get down with the pow wow
Never been a better time than right now” — Michael Peter Balzary, John Frusciante
Amazon.com’s CEO Jeff Bezos says that it’s always Day 1 at Amazon. This mentality brings agility and long-term vision to Amazon. I was thinking to myself that this might be true for habits too.
It’s always Day 1 when it comes to building habits
When you want to build a habit, you’re fighting with your status-quo. For instance, you want to stop smoking. It requires self-discipline and dedication over a long period and the first days are always hard. This is where the Day 1 mentality can help.
If it’s always Day 1, today is actually similar to tomorrow and tomorrow to the day after. What you need to do is to live today again and again until the new behaviour becomes a habit. With the example above, you just need to focus on not smoking for today. Then today becomes a variable until not smoking becomes a constant.
The unbearable lightness of Day 1
This approach on habit building relieves me somehow. Some days are just not my days whereas some days are created for me. When I look at the very past, I can only remember a couple of days where very good or shitty things have happened. Apart from that, everyday is actually quite similar and this is what makes the life simpler.
How I use this mentality everyday?
I schedule a part of my week to find out what I need to change in my life to become more independent. This practice gives me a huge backlog of habits that I need to build or break. I focus on 2 habits at the same time and keep reminding myself that it’s always Day 1 and there is nothing such as skipping today.
My name is Selcuk and thank you for reading. If you’d like to contact me, send an email to selcuk@buntcord.com
