What Could You Change in a Year?

On Monday, I’m opening my new course, Foundations, for enrollment. It is a year-long program designed to help you build better habits and practices around twelve universal pillars of the good life.

It’s always difficult to tell exactly how much someone can benefit from a course like this one. That’s not because the benefits can’t be enormous—they can be. It’s simply because every person is different, and different starting points necessarily imply different ending points.

So, instead of talking about how the course might benefit you, I’ll talk about how the experience that inspired this course—my first effort at improving my foundations—benefitted me.

How Working on Foundations Changed My Life

My first experience with this kind of project began twenty years ago. It was around this time, that I first learned about the “30-Day Trial” technique from Steve Pavlina.¹

The basic concept was simple: pick a change you want to make and stick with it for thirty days. At the end of the month, the behavior will be much closer to a habit, and you’ll know enough to evaluate whether you wish to continue it.

Learning about this technique set off a flurry of behavioral experiments. In the space of just a few years, I changed my diet, started exercising, began using a productivity system, read several books per month, joined Toastmasters, wrote a journal regularly, began waking up early, tried mediation and much more.

Those few years ended up being so transformative that they became the inspiration to start writing this blog. My article series I wrote about the experience, Habitual Mastery, was the first to bring visitors to my website.

 Building those foundations made possible everything else that followed in my life. They allowed me to graduate from university with a straight-A GPA. They allowed me to build a full-time business doing what I love. They gave me the background systems to undertake projects like the MIT Challenge and The Year Without English. They helped me make friends, meet my wife and create the life I now have today.

My case is an outlier. I don’t expect that everyone will literally change every aspect of their life from spending a year focusing on foundations. What I can say is that, in my case, I certainly did.

What I’ve Learned Since

I was successful in improving my foundations twenty years ago. But it wasn’t easy. I made a lot of obvious mistakes that I wouldn’t make again today.

1. I chose behavior changes that sounded good on paper, but were impossible to sustain in practice.
2. I focused on the wrong changes to make, neglecting changes that would have been easier to implement with bigger benefits.
3. I often failed to integrate the changes with other areas of my life. I set habits to wake up at 5:30 a.m. in college, for instance, when my major goals were to make friends and meet people.
4. I made behavioral change mistakes. In some cases, I was overly rigid—making change unnecessarily painful. In other cases, I was too loose—preventing good habits from taking root.
5. Finally, I lacked a framework. Instead of being systematic, I jumped around, working on whatever caught my attention at the time.

Thus, despite the ostensible success of my early efforts, I could have done a lot better. I wished I had access to a structured program that could guide me toward the best habits, the best books, and the most concise expert advice.

Foundations is the course I wanted for myself twenty years ago.

It’s also the program I’m following today. As many of you know, I’m going to be taking this course right alongside the students, working through exactly the same steps I’m asking you to undertake. Because I believe the only way you can have solid foundations is by maintaining the attitude of the perpetual student—always open to learn and experiment with trying things in new ways.

A lot has changed for me in the last twenty years. The habits that were right for me twenty years ago are not the same as those I need to sustain my life today. But while the exact habit, system or tool may change, the foundations themselves and the laws of behavior change are universal.

On Monday, I’m going to be opening enrollment for those of you who would like to build better Foundations. Whether you’re just getting your life figured out or you’re already experienced and just in need of a tune-up, I believe the year ahead has the potential to be transformative. I hope you agree and that you’ll join me next week for a new adventure.

1. While I first heard about it from Steve Pavlina, the method is undoubtedly older. Earl Nightingale wrote about it in The Strangest Secret, and even Benjamin Franklin suggested a version of this trick for instilling virtues.