Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of late night Amazon browsing.
Heck, who am I kidding, I always do a lot of late night Amazon browsing.
One of the magical features of Amazon — and there are many — is the “You May Also Like” bar and the “Customers Also Bought” bar underneath the item you’re currently viewing. It can help you see if the people who bought the dress you’re considering buying also bought the shoes you’re eyeing or perhaps they bought Birkenstocks instead, in which case you have an inkling your style sense might be a bit off (or spot on, depending on where you’re headed). Some of my best purchases have been items I’ve found in the “Customers Also Bought” and “Items You May Like” bars. But I digress.
My latest late night Amazon binge purchase have been books in the “personal growth” section. Late one night, while I was searching for books similar to one I had just finished and loved, Essentialism, by Greg McKeown, I came across Atomic Habits, a New York Times bestseller by James Clear. True to his name, Clear gives readable, actionable guidelines for starting and maintaining new habits in our lives. He posits that it is small, incremental changes that slowly build on each other that is the stuff of true progress and growth. In the book, he lays out four strategies for adopting better habits and getting rid of bad ones.
Though I loved the whole book, one thing that Clear wrote that really resonated for me was that if you wanted habits to stick, they shouldn’t be tied to what you want to accomplish, but rather who you want to be. In other words, determine the identity you want to have and then “prove it to yourself with small wins.”
You don’t want to run a marathon. You want to be a runner. You don’t want to publish a book. You want to be a writer. Do you see the difference? Goals end, identities don’t.
This section of the book stuck with me even after I finished. Too often, I think of myself as a fully formed being – “I have a short fuse. I’m bad with names. I’m a procrastinator.” But the truth is, I can change.
The secret to doing so is in my habits. There is a phrase in Judaism, “After the actions come the feelings.” In other words, sometimes you have to act like you feel a certain way before you actually feel that way. Act confident at a party even when you’re feeling timid and shy. Or like I tell my kids, be nice to a certain person even if you’d rather not be. Or — even better — what I often tell myself: Act like an adult even when you don’t feel like adulting.
What Clear wrote singlehandedly freed me from those identities that I’ve accepted as part of my personality. I don’t have to resign myself to being a certain way. I can become who I want slowly, incrementally, based on the habits I choose.
One of the bad habits I have is finishing one book such as this and going right to the next in one sitting, never stopping to fully think about what it is I just read or what it means for me. In this case, it is that reflection that will help me to determine the kind of person I want to be, taking on the habits that’ll get me there, and getting rid of those that don’t serve my purpose. Lucky for me, late-night Amazon surfing isn’t one I have to give up just yet.