Creating Habits to Achieve the Success You Want

One of the most mythical and mystical ideas in the standard human life is the concept of motivation; many of us see it as integral to finding success in life, to achieving our goals, to getting where we want to go. But the funny thing about motivation is that it’s also a slippery, capricious creature, hard to pin down, and even harder to harness to your will. The likelihood that it’ll be available to you when you require it in order to achieve your goals in the timeframe you want? Almost nonexistent. So we need something else; we need something that will bear us up and keep us on the path when motivation is low, or missing.

Enter habit.

Creating a routine and a number of key habits protects us when motivation fails, or when we’re feeling ‘uninspired’. (As you’ll know if you’ve read this blog post, I’m not a big subscriber to the whole idea of inspiration!) Rather than sit around waiting to be motivated, we need to create daily habits. We need to inculcate productive, useful activities that we do almost without thinking about it; if consistency is the key to success, then habit underpins consistency.

To give you some context for this post, I want to take you back to where and why it began. Today, (or really yesterday, thank you international time zone differences Australia to the USA) I started back at my final year of uni. Hurray! About two weeks ago I was dismal at the prospect of resuming study again, but course work has reignited my interest. That tingling feeling I get when I’m learning something new? It’s back in full force. Anyway, all of my units this session are writing or English subjects—last time I did that in a Trimester it truly came back and bit me on the arse with the amount of assessment, so fingers crossed I come out unscathed—and one of them is ‘Writing Short Fiction’. This is exciting for a few reasons, predominantly that, hey! I write short stories (pretty good reason, right?). Like most writers, I’m passionate about ongoing self-improvement, and this would appear to be another avenue through which to pursue that… And because I’ve recently decided that I need to kick my butt into gear and get into some serious submitting in 2018 (keep an eye out for that blog post in the coming weeks!).

As part of uni prep, over the weekend I started working through the introductory study guide. Of course, it made mention of the critical fact that writers need to write (a shock, I know), and I got to thinking.

Why have I been writing less? 

When I first started studying in 2015, I wrote every morning. A lecturer mentioned that to be a good writer, we needed to write every day, and I wanted to improve. Not even to be great, but just to be better: that was my marker of success. So I woke up at 0530, I rolled over in bed and picked up the notebook on the floor, and wrote. I started with ten minutes, then twenty, then thirty. And I did it every day. Since we moved to the US, I’ve kept writing every day, with a few lags when we’ve gone on wild adventures, but fairly consistently. In the past few months, if I’ve spent a total of an hour writing in a week, it was probably a ‘good week’. Why?

Ding ding ding! Our routine has changed. Routine is the key to success in so many aspects of my life: training, eating well, reading… and writing. And with James not instructing a class at the moment, he doesn’t have to get up at 0500 to go to PT at 6: so it is oh so easy to lie in bed together, and not get up early to write. Then the day sets in, and inevitably there are so many other things to do. Now that uni is back on, it means studying, and chores, and groceries and training… But even while I was on uni break, my writing was without much structure. Writing a biography inevitably means pausing—all.the.time.—to check a fact, or delve deeper into an idea that probably won’t even make the final draft. I got into the habit of working piecemeal on dribs and drabs of everything (never the most effective way for me to work). Every now and then, I prodded at my novel and tried to make progress editing it (status: still uncertain). I put some ink to paper for the sequel… But I didn’t really achieve very much in all of that.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I woke up early(ish) after a severely-truncated night’s sleep with a story burning in my wide-awake brain, and hightailed it to my desk. And between that moment of excitement and the reminder in my uni coursework, I realised that I need to institute better habits again. That if I want to achieve success as a writer, I need to write, and write all the time. And I need to prioritise it in my life. How?

(Re)Instituting Good Habits to Achieve Success

I set an alarm. Here’s one of my ‘big secrets’: I don’t have my phone in my bedroom. When the alarm peals out at 0530, the only way it’s getting turned off is if I get out of bed lickety-split, and dash into the study. I mash the screen with half-closed eyes before the noise wakes James—although he never seems to hear it, so maybe I should to worry about this less—and then I’m up. I’m up, and my notebook and fountain pen are right there, waiting for me. There is nothing stopping me from writing: it doesn’t matter if it’s a figment of a dream, or a new novel, or a short story (though editing I reserve for a different time, outside of writing). Success looks different to us at different stages of the journey: and the first step of my success is writing every day, consistently, without judgement. I set a thirty minute timer, and I write without looking up, engrossed in pen and paper, which keeps me safe from the delightful temptations of the internet.

This morning I woke at 0530 and I wrote for half an hour. Tomorrow, I will do the same. Whatever else comes after, I need to make writing a priority if I want to succeed. I know that I won’t always want to write. I know sometimes I’ll sit down and think that everything that comes to mind is worthless. But I’m going to write for half an hour, even if everything that I write is terrible. Eventually something decent (or perhaps even good!) will work it’s way out. And then the next day, I’ll do it again… though maybe I’ll set the timer for 7 on a weekend!

What are your habits? What’s made you defeat lack of motivation or lack of inspiration so that you can achieve your goals?

– Ana.