So what did you plan to do differently this year? What types of habits did you hope to change? Lose some bad ones, pick up some new good ones… My wife and I were talked about what we hoped to do more and less of in 2008 on New Years day. We each shared a short list of seemingly attainable goals. Attainable that is, if we actually put a disciplined habit into practice. I have heard it said that it takes at least thirty days of doing something regularly to make it a continued habit (does that sound right?).

For some reason I find instating new habits in my life a pretty challenging task. Maybe it has more to do with something else though, like my discipline, or lack there of. So where does a guy who struggles to make things stick longterm begin? How do you instill discipline into oneself effectively? Part of my problem might be the fact I can force myself to do some things that I really don’t enjoy all that much. For example, have you ever tried doing a daily reading time, I can subject myself to this as well. I did in college for about a year. I would wake up twenty or thirty minutes earlier than I had to and I would simply read for half of the time and journal at least one page for the other half. But after a while, my heart was not in it, and I was simply doing it out of religiosity… And I’m not looking to add that to my world. Lets be honest, religion has done as much bad as it has good in our world it seems.

I’m really looking for an answer. One of the best I have come across is this idea of figuring out your life rhythms and learning to install things that flow with and into that. So for instance, do you do better at working out 20 minutes a day on a more regular basis, or pump out 2 1/2 hours at the gym in one random session every once and a while. By installing a little bit of structure into the rhythm you already know will help to create more of a habit. This should work for all things, not just working out, but every facet of life. Its something I have found liberating and actually effective.

Let’s remove more of our religious habits and instate truly desired ones. I want to be disciplined, but I want to be a man of passion, and somehow I think this is just the starting blocks for the combination of these desires.