Driving new behaviors and habits

I was talking to my dad last night and I was telling him about the book, the blog, and some other things going on. It was a bit startling to see how some decisions have been reinforcing each other. At the beginning of this summer I decided I should really start writing my book. On August 10th, I wrote a post saying that I had started on it. 20 days later I ran into a challenge to create content every day for 90 days and I decided to go for it. So what’s happened since then?

I decided to talk about what I learn while writing the book when I committed to myself to write a blog post every day. That has caused me to put more effort into writing and making progress into learning this new craft. It hasn’t been a direct course to a finished book, but I have stuck to writing a blog post every day.

That has caused me to work at getting up earlier in the morning (and going to bed earlier at night) because I’ve found that life makes it difficult to write at night. The bed monster and I have been battling it out this week. The final score was Jason 3, bed monster 2 for getting up earlier. 🤨

Last night’s recognition was that keeping one commitment has pushed me forward on another commitment. That has given me something that is worth the struggle of building new habits around sleep. The two decisions I made about writing have started some positive changes. I’ve heard people talk about how this works, but now I’m experiencing it. I’m pretty happy about that.

Jason

P.S. This is my 21st consecutive blog post! 🥳
P.P.S. I searched Unsplash for “good habit” and all the pictures were of people smoking. Weird.