The default mental model many of us have with new habits is to brute force our way in. That means committing to doing it starting tomorrow and then never breaking the streak.
This is a complete fine strategy.
Until we do break the streak for a few days. Then we do it again. And it gets harder and harder to summon the willpower to take the brute force approach each time.
An alternative approach I’ve come to appreciate is to approach new habits with a lot of patience. Try to start tomorrow. But if you miss, let that miss sink in.
If it is a habit we care about (if we don’t, it won’t last anyway), each miss will get us thinking about the system we need to get things on track. And it’ll increase our intrinsic motivation to do so.
This “pull” approach to forming habits takes a lot longer to take off.
But once it does, it has a way of staying airborne a lot longer.
