I read this book in 2016. Back then my life was just about to be swept by waves of storms while I had no clue about. I remember I was marveled at the idea that our lives are actually governed by our daily habits. The examples used by the author, such as the founding and spread of Alcoholics Anonymous and the mind game played by the modern advertising industry to us, revealed how impactful this force can be. If you can identify the pattern of your behavior/habit using the rule of "cue-routine-reward", you can even replace the routine with something else and recreate a new and hopefully better, habit. How simple is that!
But I never execute this idea of creating new, better habits myself. Looking back the past a few years, I was mostly unsure of what I was doing and merely able to react to what life threw at me. In 2016 I was laid off from my first job after 20 months with the company. My choice of career--a chemical engineer with oil and gas background--was proven to be quite futureless when I just finished school. Before that, my supervisor of MSc research was an extremely mean person and I barely got through the process of earning my degree without publishing anything. My relationship with an equally immature person like me (or somehow more immature than me) was going down real quick and we were both stuck in a few bad emotion breakdowns. He then abandoned me and left for somewhere else. I then lost my EI. Things weren't looking good.
But the not-so-good time I left behind also awakened some good qualities in me: I realize I still love life very much (even when things aren't going well) and I am a very peaceful person. I told myself that I choose happiness and contentment, regardless of my situation. I am aware that it is a little bit of self-fooling but I was able to finally calm down and stop feeling sorry for myself. I have been much happier since I made up my mind to stay thankful. I also came across some interesting opportunities but so far none of them worked out yet. I am still struggling with many aspects of life that I probably have been struggling from childhood, including being able to stay focused, to learn quickly, and to work hard and to make plans and act for the sake of long-term interests. This list can go on and on. Among all those, the toughest problem I would like to deal with is to stay consistent. I need a schedule and I need executable plans.
I wonder if everything could be different if I had good habits. I always know that some annoying tasks to others such as house chores never bother me. I started organizing and doing house chore to help my busy parents. Once you overcome the painful stage of getting familiar with a task, you get used to it. I usually break things down into pieces. To me doing house chores is just completing small pieces of tasks. Another example is reading. I went through a difficult stage of trying to stay still in order to read when I was at a young age. Once I passed it, reading became pretty easy. I had nearly the same experience with reading in my second language English. These experiences made me realize however you create a habit, once it is in you, the rest will just follow through.
So let us get some habits started in 2018!