Supritha S

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.)

In order to reach this state of peak performance, however, you not only need to work on challenges at the right degree of difficulty, but also measure your immediate progress. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains, one of the keys to reaching a flow state is that “you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step.”

The mind is an extremely powerful connect-the-dots machine, constantly and rapidly making associations between what it notices, triggering any one of a zillion memories or projections about the future. All of these scenarios include you of course, and often there’s something at stake, some fixation on having things go a certain way.

Without a specific application point, a piece of classic wisdom is just a platitude.

The math involved creates a serious existential dilemma. When there are ten thousand ways to spend your time, having enough time can only mean saying no to the vast majority of the things you’ve imagined yourself one day doing. And that means never becoming most of the people you imagined becoming: the novelist, the world traveler, the dinner party... See more

This finding is well proven and has been repeated in hundreds studies across a broad range of areas. For example, implementation intentions have been found to increase the odds that people will start exercising, begin recycling, stick with studying, and even stop smoking.