Socien's Blog

Unexpectedly, the topic of habits filtered its way into the discussion I was having with someone, just after referring to James Clear’s Atomic Habits. The conversation exposed me. In the world of habits, I felt naked. If I had any habits they were in place to cover up a few essentials and they were barely good habits, unworthy candidates of success. Something was wrong.

To answer why my world of habits was wrong, I produced a list of the wrong things. First, I had to find somewhere to surrender the blame in the process. For not having good sleep patterns and staying awake at night, I found an easy victim. A government parastatal failing to provide us with electricity easily becomes one. To use the electricity available from 10 pm to 5 am I had to stay up awake, typing my work and reading. Much of my library was made up of e-books. My inability to invest in hardware for storing the power for daytime use was my end of this problem. Besides, the base station feeds on electricity and thus service provider was fast during the night (my SIM was geo-locked, meaning it could rob the network from other locations where electricity was not an issue during the day). On the base station issue, I could not resist but to find my end of the problem. I had no money to invest in my own faster WiFi solutions or Starlink.

I came to a loose conclusion that sometimes we fail to build good habits because we lack the resources. The term, I have since used to signify a combination of resources and environment is infrastructure. You have the resources when you have all the tools and a big room to start a studio at home. But when distractions peers who might wanna hand around and noisy siblings are there to interfere with your work, you have a poor environment and a poor infrastructure. People try to improve their environment by listening to its demands. For, example as a studies guy you can create a good working environment by working late at night while your siblings are asleep. Without a proper infrastructure, it is hard to develop good habits. Because you are always trying to make the infrastructure proper by waiting for the time the environment gets good.

A poor infrastructure as it seems can also be caused by poor resources. Some have none of the resources they need. The cure for poor resources is being resourceful. When you have poor resources but a good environment, you have a higher chance, I believe, to build good habits. You don’t have to pour your effort when things are right. You pour your effort at a time of your choice. This means activities surrounding that effort can be given a specific timing during the day and become habituated activities.

Effort is distinct from an activity. When you are a creative writer or an aspiring one, for example, effort is the direct practice of writing, learning to write and finding what to write. Activities include taking a shower early in the morning before you do anything just to keep your body in sync, not skipping your breakfast, sleeping for eight hours and so on. When you lack control over the time you put effort, it becomes harder for you to habitualise activities. How can I sleep for eight hours if I must awake at 2:00hrs every day just to utilise midnight electricity? If anything I can only build a reverse system. I sleep when everyone is awake.

Solution: Try being resourceful. Build an arsenal of tools that can make things happen despite pitfalls. They all must be compatible with each other.

In my case, I have been dodging power issues by investing in tech gear that could be charged cheaply. A $10 power bank with a capacity of 10000 and 2 Amps/5 Volts output rating can easily charge a Windows tablet with a lower input rating. This is a game of substitution. For it to work tools feeding other tools must be able to feed them affordably.

Strategies for overcoming environmental limitations

Instead of stressing yourself—having failed to build good habits only to blame yourself—you need to investigate closely and see to it if any factors inhibiting you from building good habits are external or internal. Before I take you further with my suggestion, take this Maya Angelou quote:

Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.

Maya Angelou

As it seems, things you have less chance to change are those happening out of your caput. But you can change some of these external happenings, and if the disrupting factors happen to be external you need to understand the degree of their being external and the extent of powers vested in you.

A noisy environment is an external factor that can inhibit a creative writer in the making who has nowhere to go except to stay with her parents. It leaves her with no choice but to settle on it during the night when everyone else is asleep.

Solution: A change in thinking can disrupt this external disruption. It alone can bring a change in preferences. We may find her switching from a Bluetooth Speaker to in-ear monitors with noise cancellation. She can give up on Billboard’s top hundred to music that rarely attracts two million subscribers to one of its top legends, Fables. That concentration music is known as Chillstep. It is free of vocals and the bass is deep.

Her solution begins with a simple thought (internal). Others may choose to start with blaming and shouting at disruptors (external).  Her solution after a simple thought initiated a change in preferences, ultimately leading to her investing in hardware that can mute the noise (external). Beginning with blaming can result in frustration (internal). Once you begin by picking up negatives outside, you create a crisis inside. Real solutions begin inside.

You are the change. Be the change before you can expect everyone and the outside situation to change. You have the solution you have been waiting for. Think! Create! Good habits are rare creating. They are a breakthrough.

In some other cases, poor infrastructure manifests itself through cultural constraints that may inhibit you from going for a certain activity. Most fail not because such cultural constraints are a hard barrier to break but because they can’t just do it without society’s approval.

Here in my country, our females are forced to wear skirts, long past their duty of covering the essentials. Wearing such skirts can easily become a value to one and people she will interact and fall in love with. When there comes a time she must migrate from the skirt it becomes a challenge for her.

We all know that a morning jog is an activity essential for one’s fitness, and a yoga pant is an essential instrument for that activity. But she is likely to have some cultural constraints here inhibiting her from ritualising a morning jog. Having moved from a stricter rural landscape, settling in a less conservative town and finally in the quite liberal expensive low-density suburb cannot easily save herself from what started as a constraint and ended up being a value. The failure to switch to yoga pants has nothing to do with resources, the lack thereof. They are caused by poor infrastructure.

Solution: The process of building good habits is one of giving up some values and doing whatever you do without being worried about the things in society’s norm books that do not conform with yours. Period.