The Proven, Reasonable and Totally Unsexy Secret to Success

If you buy more things than your bank account can sustain, that's not lifestyle creep. That's called debt.

There is a common phenomenon in the world of personal finance called “lifestyle creep.” It describes our tendency to buy bigger, better, and nicer things as our income rises.

Just improve your normal day and the results will take care of themselves. We naturally make long-term changes in our lives by slowly and slightly adjusting our normal everyday habits and behaviors.

Changing human behavior is often considered to be one of the hardest things to do in business and in life. Yet, lifestyle creep describes a very reliable way that human behavior changes over the long-term.

In my experience, there are two primary ways to change long-term behaviors and improve performance for good.Increase your performance by a little bit each day. (Most people take this to the extreme.)Change your environment to remove small distractions and barriers. (Most people never think about this.)

What if we trusted that adding more muscle or earning more money or getting better grades would come as a natural side effect of improving our normal routines? In other words, as our normal habits improved, so would our results.

What if we adapted this concept to the rest of our lives?

Similarly, if you adopt a bunch of new behaviors you can't sustain, that's not habit creep. In other words, the key is to avoid the trap of trying to grow too fast. Lifestyle creep happens so slowly that it is almost imperceptible. Habit creep should be the same way. Your goal is to nudge your behaviors along in very small ways.

This idea of slightly adjusting your habits until behaviors and results that were once out of reach become your new normal is a concept I like to call “habit creep.”