021 How to create habits for your next great beginning

The success of your next great beginning starts with the habits you create today. But how do you decide which ones to create?

This epispode’s Inspire Me quote is from Aristotle, a man who had much to say about habits:

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Leary and Armin discuss habits and how important it is to intentionally develop those that support our long-term aspirations.

Habits have three primary elements: the cue, the routine, and the reward. To develop a new habit, we need to link it to a cue or trigger.

Leary shares his recycle program for forming habits from his e-book (see below):

1. Reduce. Of all the goals you have, reduce them to the one most important long term goal. This is the one you’ll develop a habit to support.


2. Reuse. List the activities that are needed to achieve that goal and find the ones that are repetitive (that you can reuse). Form the habit around that activity, tied to an event, or as Jeremy Dean suggest’s the end of a current habit chain.


3. Recycle. Team up with someone who already has the habit you’d like to form. This takes advantage of our brain’s Mirror Neuron System which inspires us to copy another’s activities.

The Challenge Me for this episode is to identify your long term goal (Reduce), pick the repeatable activity (Reuse), and find someone to emulate (Recycle).

Resources mentioned or related to this podcast that may be helpful to you:

• 10 Strategies to Get More Done, Leary’s ebook on productivity, available for free when you subscribe to his blog (for a limited time).


• The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, an excellent and readable book on habits. Read Leary’s review. 


• How to use old habits to form new ones, Leary Gates blog post


• How to recycle habits to get more done, Leary Gates blog post