Develop Good Habits By Copying How You Develop Bad Ones.

Laziness is underrated.

There are many things about life that are unfair. There’s the fact that vegetables don’t taste like ice-cream. The fact that the human body naturally tends towards being a hairy, flabby, stinky mess. And the fact that good habits are so much harder to cultivate than bad habits.

Good habits require constant effort and vigilance to maintain whereas bad habits can be picked up effortlessly and even worse, often take conscious effort to stop. Fortunately though, there are lessons that we can learn from our bad habits and apply to the formation of more desirable ones. Let’s consider a few:

Make it easy.

Bad habits are invariably easy to stick to. Or at least they’re easier than the thing you should be doing. Nobody every found themselves unable to resist the urge to do their daily 5k run or spend an hour practising the piano. Bad habits become habits because they represent the path of least resistance and therefore we feel compelled to indulge them.

Even though it’s not as easy to detect, we feel to indulge our good habits too. We want to go running and learn to play Fur Elise on the piano, otherwise, we wouldn’t feel guilty when we don’t. We just don’t always want to do so badly enough to get started. So…