Mini Habits is a book by Stephen Guise on why smaller new habits on a consistent basis will help you achieve your goal, rather than being overwhelmed by doing everything at once. Here is a Short summary of Mini Habits.
Mini Habits: Small habits bigger results.
- A mini habit is where you start building a new habit you want to form. If you want to run a marathon, start with a mile a day.
- Begin longer distances when the smaller steps feels easy.
- Persuade yourself that one positive thought a day gradually grows into a habit that helps you develop a more optimistic view of life in general.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
Lao Tzu
- Mini habit is something you can always accomplish and can’t be complicated by definition.
- Try and follow the Mini habit regularly everyday.
- Mini habits are like seeds, and regularity is their fertilizer.
- Small intentions always go further than big ones.
- A lot of us focus on big things as if only they matter, yet we usually don’t understand that life doesn’t work this way.
- Everything starts small.
- We want too much too soon. That is an unrealistic strategy.
- Give yourself a chance to have one small accomplishment each day.
- Recurrent behavior teaches your brain to automate.
- A habit is formed when we repeat similar actions over and over again. The same is also true about emotions.
- If we react to a specific stimulus with anger, our brain remembers that we should be angry whenever we see or encounter this stimulus.
- Our brain and body work together by forming neural paths.
- When you try to do things differently or in a completely novel way, your brain might feel betrayed because that is not what is used to.
- The brain loves efficiency, and that is why we have habits. When you repeat an activity over time, your brain learns to automate the process.
- The prefrontal cortex estimates possibilities that exist for us in the future, but you need to train it.
- Motivation will not help you build new habits.
- Motivation is elusive it depends on factors such as current mood, hormonal imbalance, other people discouraging you from whatever you are up to.
- Motivation is not enough to build a habit, it is unreliable, you need the willpower to succeed.
- It is your inner strength that depends on no one and nothing except you. Willpower is the decisions you make and stick to them.
- The rule of any foundation is that is must be solid. Motivation is like building a house on liquid.
- Willpower is reliable, willpower means that you can force yourself to do something you even loathe, whereas motivation can disappear when your blood sugar level drops down.
- Will power can be strengthened, with regular practice it grows stronger according to Professor Roy Baumeister a leading self control researcher.
- Willpower strategies can be scheduled, it means that you decide when and where to do something, and you stick to your plan.
- Willpower eliminates the issue of making up excuses for yourself.
- We don’t give up when we lack motivation because it comes and goes, unlike willpower, which keeps us going strong.
- Mini habits strength your willpower.
- Whenever our energy is low, the mental activity drops down as well. nonetheless, if we teach ourselves to believe that our willpower has a fixed limit, our brain starts to recognize it as the truth.
- Mini habits show the way to minimum of what we are capable of.
- Mini habits are much more than the learned patterns of behavior; they promise that we can do much more.
- Mini habits do not require extensive effort; they are something you do with ease.
- Ego depletion theory presuppose that our inner resources are limited, and we cannot be using them forever.
- When you try to do too much all at once, no good will ever come of it. you will be exhausted with little result.
- Negative affect appears when you experience unpleasant feelings. This happens usually in the expectation vs reality type of situation.
- Use mini habits for adding good things, negative affect becomes less relevant unless your actions is directly replacing another pleasure. So there is no ego depletion.
- Setting mini- goals is the way to drop the perceived difficulty in any project.
- Subjective fatigue is how we estimate the level of being tired. Thus, fatigue is always a subjective category.
- When we are excited and somewhat carried away by the things we do, we tend to pay less attention to how exhausted we might be.
- Blood Glucose levels are critical for our body to function properly. If the level is too high for long time, a person might get diabetes., when levels are low one might get dizzy and even faint.
- Mini habits never lets that happen, as you don;t need a lot of energy to implement them.
It is far more brain-energy efficient to break things into small components that are easy “mentally digested” and less stressful
Stephen Guise
- Perceived difficulty will only help you build up your anxiety about a future event that hasn’t even happened yet.
- We often tend to overestimate how difficult some tasks will be.
- Sometimes the anticipation of difficulty takes over, and we end up not doing it. Our willpower is significantly hurt.
A guide to developing your own mini habits
Here is a step-by-step plan that will help you figure out which habits you need to develop and the best ways to do it.
- Step 1: Choose your mini habits
- Step 2: define your purpose.
- Step 3: Define your habit cues (activity based and time based).
- Step 4: Come up with appropriate rewards
- Step 5: write it down.
- Step 6: start small.
- Step 7: Don’t be hard on yourself.
- Step 8: Be patient.
Rewards encourage repeat behavior and also restore our willpower.
Stephen Guise
Rules you might need to apply to choose and implement your own mini habits.
- Never, ever cheat and be honest with yourself. Never postpone your daily goals.
- be happy with all progress, praise yourself for what you did even if you feel it isn’t fast enough.
Be happy, but never satisfied
Bruce Lee
- Reward yourself, especially after a mini habit.
- Stay level- headed, keep calm, your thinking needs to be cool and objective. Don’t let your mind rush between your anxieties about the future that hasn’t even happened yet.
- If you feel strong resistance, back off and go smaller. Break the tasks that seem overwhelming into smaller and doable ones.
- Never think a step is too small.
Small steps are sometimes the only way to make progress if you have weal willpower. Love them, and you’ll see incredible results!
Stephen Guise
- We are born into this world to learn and grow. none of us is equipped with a set of skills to make us live effectively.
- We make ourselves, we create the image to project onto the world.
- Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we fail and thats okay.
- A mini habit is an achievement you can be proud of every time you implement it. Reward yourself and make do with taking things slow, and small.
Don’t pull off until tomorrow what you can do today
Benjamin Franklin
