{"id":133112,"date":"2021-01-02T20:02:12","date_gmt":"2021-01-03T02:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artofmanliness.com\/?p=133112"},"modified":"2021-06-02T20:03:51","modified_gmt":"2021-06-03T01:03:51","slug":"sunday-firesides-one-habit-a-year-to-a-better-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/character\/habits\/sunday-firesides-one-habit-a-year-to-a-better-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Firesides: One Habit a Year to a Better Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\" Maybe you\u2019ve made some resolutions for the year to come. Or perhaps you\u2019re not into New Year\u2019s resolutions, per se, but nonetheless have a longstanding list of goals that regularly runs through your head.<\/span><\/p>\n

Either way, there\u2019s a very strong chance that, twelve months from now, you won\u2019t have accomplished any significant personal change. <\/span><\/p>\n

Some will say that\u2019s because you didn\u2019t make your goals specific enough. Or small enough. <\/span><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s likely just because you had goals, plural.<\/span><\/p>\n

Benjamin Franklin said: “Each year, one bad habit rooted out, in time ought to make the worst man good.”<\/span><\/p>\n

This one-habit-a-year approach works equally well for developing positive new practices.<\/span><\/p>\n

While we like to flatter our capabilities, the reality is that changing even a single aspect of our lives is enormously difficult to do. Fragment your tenuous focus and limited willpower by working on several goals at once, and you don\u2019t end up achieving any.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, you may balk: \u201cWhile pursuing multiple goals isn\u2019t typically effective, isn\u2019t it worth trying anyway, given that the changes I need to make feel so urgent and necessary, and can\u2019t wait a year, or five, to tackle?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The problem here is a timetable that\u2019s eschew.<\/span><\/p>\n

Looking forward, ten years from now feels like forever. And yet, when we look back from the other side of a decade gone by, the time seems to have flown.<\/span><\/p>\n

A span of years is shorter than you think, so set your goals in bigger blocks. <\/span><\/p>\n

Come 2031, you can look back and realize you\u2019re pretty much exactly the same person you were a decade ago.<\/span><\/p>\n

Or, you can reflect on the fact that you\u2019ve become an early-rising, morning-meditating, intermittent-fasting, daily-journal-writing, 64-ounces-of-water-a-day-drinking, nightly-flossing, barbell-lifting, book-a-week-reading, afternoon-walk-taking, scripture-studying dynamo. A completely new creature, built by working on one, and only one, habit each year.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe you\u2019ve made some resolutions for the year to come. Or perhaps you\u2019re not into New Year\u2019s resolutions, per se, but nonetheless have a longstanding list of goals that regularly runs through your head. Either way, there\u2019s a very strong chance that, twelve months from now, you won\u2019t have accomplished any significant personal change.  Some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":133139,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[502,461],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-133112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-character","category-habits"],"featured_image_urls":{"large":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2020\/12\/One-Habit-Header-BLANK-538x280.jpg","aom":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2020\/12\/One-Habit-Header-BLANK-372x230.jpg","reactor-320":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2020\/12\/One-Habit-Header-BLANK-320x197.jpg","reactor-640":"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/2020\/12\/One-Habit-Header-BLANK-640x394.jpg"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133112"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":133140,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133112\/revisions\/133140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133112"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beta.artofmanliness.com\/app-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=133112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}