There is a truism, the spurner of literally hundreds of self-help books, that success is built upon habits. As a believer in this truism I have organised my life around habits that build my definition of success. Strangely, however, I had never really visualised the converse of this truism: bad habits build failure and yet this is the dominant paradigm in the modern world.
A couple of years ago we met up with some old friends that we had not seen for a long time. Great people, but, with the passage of a few years it had become obvious that neglecting to mindfully build good habits into their lives has resulted in decades of bad habits; which leads me to segue into another truism: nature abhors a vacuum. Either deliberately construct a successful life built upon good habits or find yourself in your latter years, poorer than you would like, with dependent adult children, obese, unhealthy and trapped in the results of decades of bad habits at a time in your life when changing habits is more difficult than ever before.
The reality of building good habits is that we must look beyond first order effects to second and even third order effects. The easiest path, due to our evolutionary biology and the manipulation of the modern world, is to slide inevitably towards first order effects: buying into a materialistic culture, eating hyperpalatable processed food, failing to train hard and move often, spending too much time on screens and too little in the real world. Even more troubling, there appear to be intergenerational effects; epigenetics suggests that both nature and nurture have a role here.
Art DeVany is famously quoted, when asked how to lose body fat, as saying "don't get fat in the first place." And therein lies my final truism, if you want a successful life don't allow yourself an unsuccessful one: hold yourself and your children to a higher standard.
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