Meyer - Making good habits, breaking bad habits: 14 new behaviors that will energize your life

We all have habits. Some of them are good and some are bad. The good ones benefit us and add joy and power to our lives, while the bad ones do nothing but steal our peace and joy and prevent our success. A habit is something we do without even thinking about it. It is our usual manner of behavior, or a behavior pattern acquired by frequent repetition. I have read that as much as 40 percent of everything we do is done merely from habit.

If you are reading this book it is probably because you have formed a habit of frequent reading. Others who desperately need the information contained in this book wont get it simply because they have not formed a habit of reading. They probably say, I hate to read. If you repeatedly say you hate a thing, it only makes it harder to do and less enjoyable.

Good habits can be developed, and any bad habit can be broken through repetition. The experts say that a habit can be formed or broken in thirty days, so I am inviting you to give it a try and change your life by changing your habits. At first it may be difficult, but diligence and patience will eventually make you succeed. One of the reasons we dont develop the good habits we say we want is because we live in a culture of instant gratification. We want everything now and dont realize that many of the good things we want and need are not attained just because we want them. Good habits come to those who are persistent and refuse to quit.

Vince Lombardi said, Winning is a habit; unfortunately, so is losing. He also said, Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit. Make a decision right now that you can and will be a winner at forming any good habit you want to form and breaking any bad habit that you want to break.

Never start a project with doubt and fear that you wont succeed. Begin this book with the simple belief that you can change. With Gods help, you can form good habits and break bad ones. You can become a better person by developing better habits.

Recently, Real Simple magazine asked its readers what habits they wanted to break. The list of answers was huge! Among them were:

Cell phone addiction

Eavesdropping

Never finishing projects

Nail-biting

Shopping as entertainment

Cluttering

Self-criticizing

Watching too much television

Hitting the snooze button

Driving too fast

Now imagine trying to break all those habits all at once. Do you think youll succeed? I can pretty much assure you that you wont. Youll be too overwhelmed. On top of that, it takes concentration and effort to break a habit, and the older the habit, the more ingrained it is. So the first key is to choose a single habit that you want to overcome. If you start working to conquer a smaller habit, it will take less time to conquer it than a bigger one. Start small. Your victory will encourage you to tackle another habit, one thats perhaps a bit harder to break. That victory will give you more enthusiasm and resolve to break the next.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Mark Twain

Make a list of all the habits you want to make and all the ones you want to break. Now choose one and use the principles in this book to help you do what you want to do, and stop doing what you dont want to do. If you focus, one at a time, on the habits you want to make, eventually theyll become second nature. If you focusone at a timeon those you want to break, eventually you will conquer them all. But if you look at them all at once you will probably feel overwhelmed and be defeated before you ever begin. Working toward a change is much easier if we take one thing, one day at a time, and stick with it until we experience breakthrough. Dont ever be discouraged with yourself because you have not arrived at success, but instead be pleased that you are pressing toward it. Discouragement will only zap the strength you needand haveto eventually succeed.

I must admit that I am very excited for myself as a writer and for you as a reader because I know that we will both benefit from this book. I am looking forward to forming better habits and I pray that you are too. Merely reading this book wont give you the success you desire, but it will give you the tools you need and hopefully ignite in you a passion for change. And passion is like jet fuel: Once you have it, there will be no stopping you!