by Fumio Sasaki
Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.
—Blaise Pascal
I am now spending days like they’re weeks. From morning until evening, the time I spend working and studying is like a week at the office. And then I go through all the habits I should be performing in a day after first going to the gym to exercise. Once the sun sets, it’s like the weekend has come: it’s time for a free, relaxed period. It’s okay to do anything after you’re done with what you need to do that day. When I first started sticking to a schedule and building my habits, I was utterly exhausted, and there were times when I slacked off and played around with my smartphone. The strange thing was, I didn’t feel guilty. In other words, I realized that it hadn’t been my actions in themselves, but rather the fact that they were diversions I was creating to avoid doing the things that needed to be done that was making me feel guilty. Once I started getting used to my habits, I stopped getting so exhausted, and my slacking off and tendency to look at my smartphone settled down naturally. Now, when I have free evenings, I often watch movies.
Anyone would want to use their time as beneficially as possible, and that’s what habits are for. But it’s impossible to make all twenty-four hours beneficial, and, what’s more, it’s not necessary. As I continued on with my habits, I started to realize that it was also necessary to consciously give myself time to clear my head.
Kojin Karatani and Immanuel Kant’s ways to take a breather
The critic Kojin Karatani, who I feel is an exemplary Japanese intellectual, ceases to work by the evening and spends his nights watching TV dramas and movies. In other words, he doesn’t use his head in the evening. And he’s said to have been living like that for more than a decade.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant was also like a god of habits. He famously took walks at three-thirty every day. Because he was always so punctual, people who saw him adjusted their watches. Kant stayed single throughout his life, lived in his hometown, Königsberg, and apparently never noticed that the sea was only a few hours away.
Although it sounds like Kant was an eccentric genius, he actually possessed a social side and was good at conversation. He ate one meal a day, but he enjoyed small talk, not only with his colleagues but with townspeople with various backgrounds, during that meal. He said it was unhealthy for a philosopher to eat a meal alone. Conversing was his method of resting his mind.
We need changes in our habits, too
In certain cultures, people walk trails for thousands of kilometers. For them, since they walk day in and day out, the walk isn’t a trip anymore and it becomes instead an everyday occurrence. Even trips on foot in the great outdoors will gradually become an everyday activity if done regularly. Similarly, when I became a freelancer, my “every day is a Sunday” situation quickly lost its glamour. I began to think that we also need an adequate amount of change in our habits.
It’s good to practice your habits every day, until you start to gain a sense of their rewards and then acquire those habits. But more than anything, you want to still feel like you want to continue with those habits. So you can make changes now and then, and take breaks, so that you don’t get bored; in my case, I’ve started to think that it’s a good idea to take a day off or go somewhere at least once a week.
Step 38: Don’t mix up your “objectives” and your “targets”
Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
—Gustave Flaubert
According to Bob Schwartz’s Diets Don’t Work, only ten out of two hundred people succeed in dieting, and only one of those ten can continue to maintain their achieved weight. Although there may be many people who achieve their objectives, it’s rare to be able to maintain them.
This is probably because many people consider dieting a means to achieve their target weight through discipline, for a set period of time. Once they achieve their target, they’re satisfied, and relax their efforts. Eventually, they return to their initial weight. Dieting isn’t like obtaining a medical license or passing the bar exam, which, when obtained or successfully completed, doesn’t require updating. Dieting isn’t a one-time event. The objective of a diet is to find a lifestyle that is sustainable without suffering.
The result will be burnout if you only have a target
Many athletes become depressed after competing in the Olympics. Similarly, some astronauts also become dispirited after their space journeys.
Professional video game player Daigo Umehara says he experiences the same thing. He’s learned to make his objective “continuing his development,” not just winning tournaments. He gets burned out and can’t go on if his only goal is to win.
Schwarzenegger’s “master plan”
The Japanese terms for targets, objectives, and benchmarks use similar characters, and it gets confusing. To make up for this confusion, we can look at what Arnold Schwarzenegger calls a “master plan.”
He continually asks himself: “What is it that I can do today for my big objective, my master plan?”
My target is to achieve a certain time for my marathons. Setting a goal of three hours and thirty minutes sustains my drive to train each day. The overall purpose of running, for me, is to maintain a healthy mind and body. It’s also a target of mine to publish books, for which the objective is to fulfill my curiosity.
Step 39: Look only at the targets in front of you
A hero is a man who has done what he can.
—Romain Rolland
In bowling, a common tip is to aim the ball not at the pins but at the nearby arrows. We should keep this in mind when making something a habit. Why is that?
GOOD HABIT INHIBITOR: The “single-coin” issue
Sometimes, a person working towards a goal will suddenly realize the total amount of effort necessary to achieve it, which can be discouraging. For example, to save up a million dollars, one must diligently and patiently save smaller increments daily. But when you see someone who already has a million dollars, the few dollars you try to save appear silly.
You feel similarly bitter when hearing a bilingual speaker’s flawless English, which makes it seem meaningless to memorize a single English word.
You look at everybody’s projects and accomplishments on social media, and lose motivation upon realizing how much more effort it will take you to reach that point.
How Kazu played to the age of fifty-one
To deal with the “single-coin issue,” you need to focus only on the target in front of you.
Kazuyoshi “Kazu” Miura continues to play soccer at age fifty-two, but I don’t believe it was always his goal to play until such a mature age. The idea of retirement had already entered his mind when he was thirty. He thought then that he’d quit in two years, and kept having the same thought every two years until he reached his current age.
My second marathon was a tough one; I injured a knee. Thinking of how much I had left to run at the twenty-kilometer halfway point or the thirty-kilometer point would have made me want to give up. So, during the second half, I said I’d stop after two more kilometers. I kept thinking the same thing after every two kilometers I ran, and somehow reached the finish line.
The film Hacksaw Ridge is based on a true story of a combat medic who single-handedly saved the lives of seventy-five wounded soldiers. The lead character remains at the site of his deployment even after his unit has retreated and continues to carry the wounded who have been left behind. Amid the gunfire on the battlefield, all he thought was: “Lord, please help me get one more.”
On the other hand, you can also receive courage and motivation from the things you’ve achieved in the past. Marathon runner Naoko Takahashi once noted: “How much of a distance have I run to date? I only have forty-two kilometers to go.”
Step 40: Experience failures—they’re indispensable for your habits
To acquire habits, it’s necessary to experience as many failures as possible. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to acquire habits simp
ly by reading this book; you need both trial and error.
“How can you succeed?” This is a question that often asked in self-help and business books, and the answer is very easy. Rather than aiming to succeed, you should quickly experience as many failures as you can. Why is that?
A friend of mine says he grins every time he fails at something. To him, failing is discovering a method that won’t work, and it brings you one step closer to succeeding. Find many methods that don’t work and one day, you’ll find a method that does. Seen this way, failure is almost the same as success. In the same manner that work is complemented by rest, success and failure are mostly the same concepts within the same process. All we’re doing is drawing the line for apparent results at a particular time and assigning them different names.
No one wants to needlessly fail. That’s why we seek advice and hunt for tips. When we do that in order to avoid failure altogether, though, we end up taking the longer route towards success. It’s embarrassing to fail, and we may never receive our reward and end up losing out. We might lose our motivation and become unable to keep going. But those who succeed are those who don’t quit in the face of failure, and they’re the ones who continue until the end. That’s all there is to it.
The meaning of accumulating failures
When something becomes a habit, we’re able to practice that habit much more easily than we could have imagined before we acquired it. But that doesn’t simply mean you enjoy doing it. There will be times when you’re sleepy in the morning, and there will be times when you don’t feel like going to work or going out for your run.
But you can overcome such feelings if you keep records of the failures that you accumulate. I feel down when I can’t get up in the morning. Like I wrote earlier, it makes me unable to do yoga or my morning work.
A failure I’ve repeated over and over again is drinking too much, wasting the next morning and the rest of the day, and regretting it. Each time I’ve done that, I’ve taken notes. Thinking back, I see them as necessary failures. A failure or two isn’t a penalty. As I said earlier, the “you” of tomorrow always looks like Superman, and can act differently from the “you” of today. When you fail and let go of the illusion that you can do everything right now, everything begins.
Differentiating between failure and self-doubt
With failure, it’s important to not become depressed afterwards. Recall the children unable to wait for their second marshmallow in the marshmallow test. It’ll get tougher to obtain our future reward if we feel down or hopeless in the present. Let’s try not to fall into a trap of vicious cycles.
The more negative something is, the more we tend to emphasize its role in our lives, a natural human tendency called negativity bias. Because of negativity bias, we can’t help but pay attention to a habit we’ve failed to acquire. At times like this, it’s also important to turn our attention to habits that we’ve succeeded in acquiring.
The minimalist Seiko Yamaguchi says that when her house is a mess, rather than fixating on her messy home and feeling disappointed, she acknowledges herself with a statement such as: “I’m hustling so much right now that I can’t even start cleaning house!” When you fail at something, it only means the method that you’ve tried wasn’t the right one, not that you are to blame.
Step 41: Stop worrying about how long it will take for something to become a habit
How long do you have to continue to do something for it to become a habit? This question probably crosses everyone’s mind. One famous answer is “twenty-one days.” This seems to be a myth stemming from a story about a patient whose arms and legs were amputated who took twenty-one days to get used to that state.
In any case, for something to become a habit, a change must actually occur in the neural circuit indicating a difference in what someone perceives to be a reward. The idea that a complicated process like that can be summed up with a specific number of days is peculiar in the first place.
One paper reported that the average number of days for actions like drinking water or doing squats to become habits was sixty-six days. But this was an average of a range of time periods from eighteen to two hundred and fifty-four days, with so great a variance that it can hardly serve as a reference.
I believe that it’s better to not assess habits numerically. Although there’s value in challenges taken with a specific number of days in mind, such as a thirty-day squat challenge, the important thing isn’t the short-term target; it’s whether you’ll be able to continue on the thirty-first day, after you’ve completed your challenge. If, at that point, you’re still thinking of your challenge as an act of endurance, you’re not likely to continue the habit.
You’ll know when something becomes a habit
There’s no answer to the question of how many days it will take for something to become a habit. But I can say that when you acquire a habit, you’ll be able to sense it.
I’d like to give you an example of a time I gained that sense. I had been going to the gym for almost ten years, but only once a week or even once a month when I was busy. On the fifth day after I started going every day, the gym was closed. Before, I probably would have been relieved, thinking, “It can’t be helped if they’re closed. Lucky me.” But on that day, I thought, to my own surprise: “Oh, they’re closed. What a shame.”
My brain was starting to see exercise as something that felt good, something that gave me a sense of achievement rather than as a taxing obligation, which it had been before.
Signs for a sugar fast
I also know when I’ve been able to break a bad habit that I wanted to quit. One day, about three weeks after I started my sugar fast, I saw fluffy cream-filled breads, and sandwiches with whipped cream and sweet bean paste, at a bakery shop, and found that I thought nothing of them. I had been hungry, but upon seeing the excessive sweetness, I even felt a bit nauseated. I hear that Japanese sweets are popular among foreigners because they aren’t too sweet, and the sensation I got then might be similar to the way a Japanese person feels when they’re in a foreign country and eat desserts that are too sweet.
In the past, I would have had to exercise willpower to prevent myself from eating what I wanted. But my neural circuit that craved sweets seemed to have gone dormant, and today, I have lost the sense that I’m “staying away” from sweets. That’s a sign that I’ve completed the process of quitting them and kicking that habit aside.
There’s a saying that particularly resonates with me: “Live the answer.” You don’t know how many days it’ll take for something to become a habit. But when you have the answer to that, you’re already living it.
The goal is to stop being conscious of it
I think every aspiring minimalist’s goal is to stop being conscious of the fact that they’re practicing minimalism. That is, the goal is reaching a state where minimalism is present in your actions without your being aware of it.
It’s the same with habits: once you stop thinking about the habit, you’ve really acquired it. Regarding the habits I’ve developed, I don’t have a particular awareness of keeping them up or dedicating conscious thought to persevere; I simply act.
I don’t have a desire to write about my habits on social media and make people aware of them. Running ten kilometers a day has now become natural for me, not something to be celebrated or publicized. Sometimes I don’t feel like going to the gym, but while I entertain such thoughts, I somehow always end up going.
You haven’t acquired a habit yet if you’re worried about breaking it. When you’ve truly acquired a habit, you’re confident that you would never quit, despite potential situations that might make it difficult to keep it up. Think about brushing your teeth: you feel uncomfortable if you don’t. When you’re maintaining an action without being aware of nurturing a habit, that might be the time that it has become a true habit.
Step 42: Do it; it’s better than not doing it
In Haruki Murakami’s book What I Talk About When I Talk About Run
ning, he tells the story of when he interviewed Olympic runner Toshihiko Seko:
I asked him, “Does a runner at your level ever feel like you’d rather not run today, like you don’t want to run and would rather just sleep in?” He stared at me and then, in a voice that made it abundantly clear how stupid he thought the question was, replied, “Of course. All the time!”
I wanted to hear that answer directly from Mr. Seko. Whether despite a difference like heaven and earth in our muscular strength, the amount of exercise that we get, and motivation, he had ever felt the same way that I have when he got up early in the morning and tied his shoelaces. And the answer Mr. Seko gave at the time gave me genuine relief, that, it’s the same for everyone after all.
There are times that Murakami, who has been running practically every day for more than twenty years, doesn’t want to run. In the same way that Murakami was relieved by Seko’s words, I, too, was relieved by Murakami’s words.
While habits refer to actions that we perform with barely a thought, we can’t always make choices without thinking; conflicts will always, eventually, arise. Because we’re human, there will always be times when we simply aren’t in the mood to do something.
There is suffering in continuing to practice habits. But compared to the regrets we have when we don’t practice them, I think it’s far better to do them. By accumulating failures in our attempts to do something, we will someday gain a greater amount in rewards. If we don’t make the attempt, we’ll have the same regrets anyway, and we’ll also have a sense of self-doubt. So we can choose whichever seems to be even slightly better: doing the task at hand, even when we don’t want to.