Here’s the real trick to making lasting life changes
Why so many efforts to change our lives fail
If you’re looking to change something in your life — make more money, get in shape, get more done, feel better about yourself — there’s no shortage of advice about how to do it. But changes are often short-lived: for example, about 90 percent of people who successfully lose weight gain it back. The reason why dawned on me as I attempted to grow a garden. Here is a simple lesson that experience has taught me.
I didn’t have grand gardening ambitions. “You reap what you sow” seemed like a good mantra. So I set out to find things that were easy to sow. I looked for recommendations about easy-to-grow produce. I cleared all the weeds, tilled the soil, planted the seeds, and watered them diligently for the first week to make sure they grew. Below is what my garden looked like after a few months.
Believe it or not, there’s some asparagus, strawberries, corn, carrots, and watermelon plants somewhere in there. As you might note, there are also a few stray baby trees and lots and lots of weeds. Ultimately, the watermelon and corn plants didn’t produce anything, and the strawberries were small and mostly got eaten by tiny black bugs. The asparagus was good at first but eventually got out of control and looked more like giant dill.
What went wrong? Well, it should have been pretty obvious that weeds will keep popping up in gardens no matter how much time you spend preparing the soil and de-weeding in the beginning. There is no way around it (one year, I tried laying down straw around the strawberries to keep weeds at bay and they still grew). And if you are not prepared to de-weed regularly, anything you plant will ultimately be overrun by weeds. My initial efforts were great, but I didn’t plan for the garden’s future.
“Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.” said George Santayana. This applies to human endeavors too. Our long-run success in anything depends on our ability and willingness to repeat certain actions over and over. “Weeds” will pop up in life just like weeds in my garden. These can take the form of familiar, comfortable habits; demands on our time; work and life responsibilities; unexpected events; and so on. If we don’t have an ongoing plan for addressing these “weeds”, life will probably just revert to the way it was before. So the simple — but not easy — “trick” to changing one’s life for good is to have a feasible longer-run plan that will keep us where we want to be.
A lot of what we do to make life changes initially is not sustainable. If you’re losing five pounds per week, you’re probably not eating in a way that you can sustain for the rest of your life. If you’re sleeping four hours a night to make the time to set up your online business, you will probably not have the energy to keep it going long-run unless you give something else up. If you’re using time that you would normally spend with your friends to exercise and get in shape, you might find yourself struggling to keep that up long term. So when planning on making a long-run change, the first question to ask oneself is, “How can I make this change sustainable for the long term?”
I ultimately decided that finding time to regularly weed my garden wasn’t worth it for me, and I’ve made peace with the way it looks. But in other areas of my life I care more about, I try to remember that there will not be a time when I can just “phone it in.” Permanent change comes from life-long repetition, not short-run sprints.
