One Push Up: My personal guide on building habits

This may be one of the most important 5 minutes of your life.

The lesson here is one that took me quite some time to understand, but its potency over nearly all aspects of my life is inarguable.

Let me tell you a story…

A few years ago, a friend of mine told me I should write a book called “One Push Up” because of how robust this technique I employ to fulfill goals is. However, the concept is quite elementary, necessitating less than 1,700 words. Thank God.

The genesis of this idea is that for twenty-one years of my life, I was never able to make working out “stick” despite several earnest attempts.

I would work out for a week at most, feel fantastic, kiss my fledgling biceps in the mirror, then stop, and pick it up again a few months later… with similar unsuccess.

This applied almost invariably to any of the habits I consciously attempted to build.

Then I read an article from BJ Fogg (psychology professor and director of the Stanford Behavior Design Lab) essentially saying that “if you want to build the habit of flossing, give yourself the goal of flossing a single tooth a day.”

The germane point being that the most arduous part of any task lies in the initial stage.

In other words, merely getting started is (say) 70% of the work!

There are several other incarnations of this idea. Indeed, Woody Allen says something like “80% of the work is showing up.” However, I’m making a more extreme and specific claim.

70% of the hurdle to work is initiatory.

When I was twenty-two years old, give or take, I had come off of a break-up that wasn’t just heart-wrenching but it was a destabilizing event because it told me I could be wrong about something I was entirely certain about.

You can think of this in terms of my paraphrasing of the Fristonian Free Energy Principle “if your model of the world has a high degree of certainty, and you’re shown to be incorrect, you will encounter despair.”

I recall thinking—no, I recall knowing that I was going to get married to that girl. I had papers and papers of different plans I had made for places to visit, to eat, what we’d get for our home, etc.

Then it ended.

And I was a wreck. How could I be so sure but so wrong?

Something had to change.

One of them was taking myself more seriously, as I had coasted on sheer wit through my life up until that point, but cleverness could only get one so far if their personality is embryonic and brooding.

Part of my fix was to realize that my mental health was tied to physical health. I was quite small, at just under 110 lbs. Prior goals were set unrealistically high, such as 30-minute gym sessions, despite that being a relatively “small” session.

When building a habit, it’s demoralizing to fail even once.

Then I told myself, “you know what? Forget this constant setting up of a goal and failing and feeling horrible, and then cycling… I’m going to do one push up a day.”

This was the change in perspective I needed…

Why? Unfailingly, when I would start the “one” push up, I would do more (say, 10, or 20). But the point is that I didn’t have to. The point is, the barrier to entry was so low that I had zero excuse.

After a few months, I modified my goal to involve something with dumbbells, again just once a day.

Then to the gym.

Then to ever-increasing more obligations.

Then it got to the point where I never missed a single day of “working out” for literal years in a row! (Yes, even while sick. Although exertion during a flu is not physically healthy, it was more psychologically healthy for me in the long run because it was important that I didn't break my streak, less risk turning something inveterate into fleeting.)

All of this, stemming from the initial commitment to “one push up.”

I’ve applied this goal to various other aspects of my life such as nutrition, studying for TOE, and filmmaking (when I was a filmmaker).

The question is: is the mere modification of the internal dialogue from “I’m going to do goal X” to “I’m going to do diminutive version of goal X, daily” all that’s required?

Actually, in most cases, yes.

I know people who wanted to run first thing in the morning, and tasked themselves with merely putting on their shoes. They didn’t set a goal of running for 10 minutes. Just lace up. The rest followed.

Scaling Down to Scale Up

Technique #1: Mince your practice

That is, make your mission into a habit, and then make the habit so small that you can’t fail. Covered above.

Technique #2: Allow for stakes

In other cases, what aided me was some external “stake.” Accordingly, to improve the “one push up” technique, I add a cost, rather than a reward. The cost is usually reputational. For instance:

• Making public promise to family, or to Twitter, or what have you.

• In school, the date of an exam / grades that are consequences of that, were sufficient to light a fire.

• Buying a gym membership counts, or even booking a date with a trainer, as you don’t want to lose money.

For me, it often takes the form of a public commitment where I don’t want to look foolish / let someone down. For instance, it’s almost impossible to bring myself to study for a guest unless I have a date penned with them in the calendar… Now I must study due to external pressures.

Technique #3: Set the duration

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions.

However, given that roughly 66 days† are required to form even the most stubborn habit, I started making October 27th my version of New Year’s resolutions. The reason is that October 27th is 66 days prior to January 1st, and I’d rather start January 1st with an established, intentional, salubrious habit than attempt to originate one on January 1st.

Technique #4: Many birds

This modification is (only temperately) more advanced.

A question I ask myself frequently is both “how can I accomplish goal X, while also accomplishing goal Y?” or failing that, “How can I accomplish goal X in such a manner that it makes goal Y more straightforward / effortless?”

Given my near-daily tasks of…:

• guest preparation

• reading articles

• watching talks

• editing podcasts

• marketing the podcasts / uploading to YouTube / etc.

• exercising

• writing personally

• writing publicly

• thinking

• spending time with my wife

…which of these can serve the other? One answer that manifests is to take the articles I read or talks I watch and then write about them. I’ve done so here:

• “Everything is a Lagrangian submanifold” (written as part of my studying for Eva Miranda)

• “There is no wave function.” (written as part of my studying for Jacob Barandes)

That’s the low hanging fruit, but there are other creative ways that I’ll get to in another post at some point, so feel free to subscribe, and read the comments as others talk about their triumphs, misadventures, and tactics.

I like to keep the last one (“spending time with my wife”) isolated because I know the danger of thinking of people, especially those close to you, instrumentally. That is, something I want to avoid is to conceptualize time with others as means to some other end, rather than being intrinsically valuable.

…Now, how about I put my own technique in action in front of you?

What I, Curt, would like to change.

This week, I noticed that there’s far too large of a backlog of what I need to read / watch / etc.

A daunting and grievously growing list of this sort is something I’m sure you’re familiar with.

Actually, I’ve noticed this for some time but it just struck me as something I should solve with my own technique. That’s in part what precipitated this post you’re reading.

In addition to reading, I also need to write. The reasons are as follows in almost syllogistic form:

Language is powerful. The more verbally adept you are, the more you can find connections and disconnections, as well as articulate your own ideas. The “verbal” comes in two forms: oral and written. What is practiced in public is sharpened faster due to the brisk (and harsh) feedback. Via the podcast, I have the spoken word down (partially, at least). What’s missing is the writing component. Thus, writing here on Substack will allow me to articulate my own ideas.

To accomplish this, I must be more slapdash about my writing, rather than agonizing over the construction of sentences. To do this, I will write out my cogitations, working out the idea in real-time on the page, effectively extemporaneously.

Consequently, I endeavor to write more frequently, and to do so publicly - here on Substack.

My relatively high bar for deliberation must still be there (that’s just a personal value of mine), but I’ll have to actively select when to mute this scrupulousness.

As mentioned before, something else I’ve been slacking on is that there are some papers I haven’t been able to bring myself to read, and talks I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch. Therefore, each day I commit to reading / watching (respectively) for just 60 seconds, on any one of them. That’s it.

To summarize:

1. From my backlog, I will read a paper a day, watch a talk a day. This needs to total 60 uninterrupted seconds (each).

2. For my writing, I will write for 60 seconds, either organizing / cohering old thoughts, or generating novel thoughts in the moment, and I’ll do so near stream of consciousness, with the understanding that eventually when it’s meaty enough / passes my internal threshold of quality it will be published on Substack.

Take aways for you

The “one push up” technique is uncomplicated as an idea and also achievable as a practice, fortunately. To break it down simply in steps:

1. Pick a habit you’d like to form.

2. Figure out what is the smallest version of that habit.

3. Look at Step 2 and break that even further. Be humble.

4. Commit (with stakes) to doing the above, each day.

5. That’s it.

Bonus: If you’re someone who cares about New Year’s Resolutions, then put a mark in your calendar for Oct 27th instead. Each time you have a habit you’d like to instantiate, make a note, so that on that day, you can implement whatever is relevant to you at the time. This will ossify a routine behavior into you for Jan 1st.

If you know someone who could benefit from this, share this article with them (one click below).

I’d love to hear what your working on and towards, in the comments. I read each and every response.

- Curt Jaimungal

Footnotes

† This timeframe is based on research from University College London published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, which found habit formation takes between 18 to 254 days, with 66 days being the median time for a behavior to become automatic.