The Best Habit You Can Build

The most powerful habits are meta habits.

Meta habits go far beyond actions like taking a cold shower or working out first thing in the morning. Meta habits are ways that you approach your life — they permeate everything you do.

Curiosity is a meta habit.

Focus is a meta habit.

The meta habit that I am prioritizing the most in my life right now is effort.

Throughout my career as both a musician and software developer, I’ve seen how true it is that the way you do one thing influences how you do everything.

When I’m on top of my nutrition and training hard at the gym, I’m also sure to be crushing my projects at work, being consistent with my writing, and showing up as the best version of myself in my relationship.

If I fall off my routine for a few days, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly I become a complete piece of shit.

All of a sudden I want cheeseburgers and fried chicken. I don’t want to lift weights anymore. I’ll prefer watching Netflix to creating, and I’ll turn into a Grumpy Gus with my partner.

Building the habit of trying your best in everything you do will create self-confidence, presence, self-respect, and happiness — and it will naturally produce your best results.

This may sound obvious — of course trying your best yields the best results.

But I’m not just talking about the vague and platitudinal “try your best.” I’m talking about intentionally making effort a meta habit that you apply to every aspect of your life.

Make a conscious commitment to try your best at everything you do and you will transform your life in ways you can’t imagine. Here are just a few of those ways.

Flow

Flow states occur when you are completely immersed in what you are doing, experiencing the perfect degree of challenge, and getting real-time feedback on your performance.

Flow is the peak of human experience. If you want to perform at the best of your abilities you’ll need to be able to enter flow.

Flow is intrinsically connected to effort. If you’re singularly focused on what you’re doing and trying your best, it’s impossible to be distracted by anything else. If your mind is wandering and you’re not fully present, you are not trying your best.

In his book “Flow”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi advocates finding flow in everyday life experiences, like walking around the block and even brushing your teeth. Approaching these potentially mundane experiences as sources of flow is how you can make this a habit.

The problem is pursuing flow states directly is tricky.

You risk being too self-conscious about whether or not you’ve achieved the lofty “flow” — the pinnacle of human consciousness. Once you start observing yourself and over-analyzing, you’ll become distracted and will compromise your flow state. Flow is elusive.

A better approach is to achieve flow through the proxy of trying your best. Your best effort is easier to quantify than “flow”. If you commit to focusing your full and undivided attention on what you’re doing, you will be trying your best, and flow states will follow.

Self Respect

When you try your best, you signal to yourself that you are disciplined, a hard worker, and worthy of respect.

The most that you can do in any given situation is try your best, so if you do this honestly, you won’t obsess over the results of your labor. You’ll be free to be present and engaged in the process since you’ll have no doubts about what you could be doing better.

Self-respect is not special or unique — you respect yourself the same way that you respect others. You respect people who embody the values, traits, and skills that you admire. This value list differs from person to person, but we all value a strong work ethic.

You respect yourself in proportion to how you embody the values that you hold, and since you undoubtedly value sincere effort, trying your best is the simplest way to increase your self-respect.

I don’t believe that there is any difference between true self-respect and happiness.

Not the fleeting pleasure that is destined to turn to pain, but real happiness. Fulfillment. If you build self-respect by continuously signaling to yourself that you are someone worthy of respect, how will you fail to be happy?

And what better way is there to signal to yourself that you are worthy of your own respect than by committing to always trying your best in everything you do?

Autotelic Activities

An autotelic activity is something that is not a means to an end but is intrinsically worth doing.

When you think about it, most of what you do isn’t autotelic. Our lives are largely made up of activities that have a purpose: we need to pay the bills, take care of our families, pay down the mortgage, and so on.

When you play music with your friends or meet your coworkers for an evening soccer game, you’re engaging in autotelic activities. These events are fun, and there is no purpose beyond the fulfillment you get from doing them.

What distinguishes these activities from the tedious chores that take up most of our days?

Engagement. Your mind is not wandering when you do something autotelic. You are completely focused. You’re present. In the moment.

The engagement you bring to any task influences how you feel about it. The easiest way to increase your engagement is through effort.

I’m not suggesting that sending emails or brushing your teeth will be as fulfilling as playing music or soccer, but these activities that default to mundane can be brought to life by a commitment to perform them well.

Try this: Start with one day, and attempt to do every minute task to the best of your ability.

I dare you to honestly embrace this challenge and not have an amazing day.

Effort is how you can create intrinsic value in even the mundane aspects of your life.

An Antidote to Procrastination

Yeah, I believe that a commitment to consistently trying your best is the most effective way to stop procrastinating.

Let’s break it down.

You might procrastinate on minor chores like doing the laundry or getting groceries because you’re lazy, but you procrastinate on the big, meaningful moves in life because of fear.

It’s the fear that you’ll find out you’re not good enough to do what you want. So you endlessly put off applying for the promotion, starting your newsletter, creating a side hustle, or whatever is that will test your abilities.

What’s happening in these situations is that you are outsourcing your self-worth to these future conditions. You’re operating from a self-worth deficit, and the thing that you’re procrastinating on becomes your salvation.

It’s the trap of “I’ll be happy or fulfilled when….”

This puts tons of pressure on the goal and turns it into a terrifying self-defining endeavor, so it’s easier to perpetually hide under fake reasons for why you can’t start than to face it.

The cure comes down to, yet again, self-respect. You have to realize that you are already enough and that achieving the status or goal won’t fundamentally change who you are.

When you can fully accept who you are in this moment, you won’t need these goals to save you.

When you make the commitment to embrace trying your best, you inevitably increase your self-respect and make yourself resilient to the sting of failure.

If you know that you gave it your best shot, you didn’t fail. You just discovered something that wasn’t quite right for you. It’s an iteration, not the end.

When you develop self-worth and the belief that you are enough through your commitment to trying your best, it doesn’t mean that you abandon your big hairy audacious goals.

You just pursue them with a different attitude.

You no longer operate under a self-worth deficit, where your goal represents your salvation. Your work takes on a different color, it becomes a fun journey rather than a desperate means of proving something to yourself.

You stop focusing so much on the results and get lost in the process. This is where your best work and, ironically, your best results come from.

• Trying your best leads to self-respect.

• Self-respect dilutes the fear of failure.

• Dilute the fear of failing, and your goals become less terrifying.

Make effort a meta habit, and watch how your life changes in a year.