A long time ago I read about how Michael Jordan practiced. Despite being creative on the court, almost all of his practice was the basics. Free throws, three pointers, dribbling. I figured that if it was good enough for MJ, it was good enough for me, and so I've always tried to focus on the basics, too.
What's interesting about the basics is that you spend lots of time doing them, and that they have a disproportionate effect on everything else. Any incremental benefit you realize will be applied a lot throughout your life, and it will also slightly increase your performance in many other areas.You'd probably agree that this is true, and maybe even feel like it's too obvious to be mentioned. I think so too, but time and time again I see people neglect the basics and work on other things.Take sleep, for example. You spend a third of your life sleeping, and the quality and quantity of your sleep has a dramatic effect on nearly everything else that you do. But how many people are really focused on good sleep? How many people try to become better sleepers, developing good sleep habits and improving their sleeping environment?Diet is another good one to look at. The food that goes into your mouth is your only fuel. Your current dietary habits will form the basis if your lifelong dietary habits. Your mental processes, health, and emotional wellbeing are all massively influenced by your food intake. Yet how many people make their diet a priority?What habits actually make up the list of basics could be argued, but it's not really important. We all know what a basic looks like when we see it. It's part of our everyday life, it has an outsize affect on other factors, and it's not very glamorous. My "top 10" list would be something like:
There's some overlap and fuzzy borders between some of those, and you might think of a better list, but it's a start. My advice to anyone who doesn't feel like they are doing exactly what they should be doing would be to systematically work on those ten basics. I'd rate myself for each one, pick the lowest score, and work it until I got it to an 8-10.
That process isn't glorious and it's not exciting, but it gives you very high leverage on your future. Each one of the basics that you improve upon will make it even easier to work on the next one. Once you hit a critical mass where all of them are an 8/10 (by your own standards), you'll find that anything new you tackle will be much easier than you would have expected it to be. Your well being and enjoyment of life will also be at an all-time high. That's the power of the basics.
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Photo is basic healthy food in a market in Wuyi, China.
If you want to totally screw up your life, here's my advice: cultivate some bad habits. That's how most people do it. Very few people screw up their lives by drinking once, but a lot of people screw it up by developing a drinking problem. I've never heard a story of someone who went to Vegas for the first time and lost his entire fortune, but I've heard plenty of stories of people with gambling addictions who have blackjacked their way to bankruptcy. Even breakups are far more likely to be caused by habitual bad behaviour than by a single action (even in the case of cheating, a lot of couples stay together).
This is because a single action doesn't have all that much leverage on your life. But habits, on the other hand, define us as people-- literally. What we do regularly becomes a label. Bob's an alcoholic. Tom is a cheater. Raymond is a gambler. Habits change ephemeral verbs (Tom cheated) to nouns. Once you're defined by your habits, it takes a lot to change that. If Bob doesn't drink for a night, he isn't magically changed into tee-totaler. You are your habits.
And that's why habits are my religion. I write about them all the time, from every single angle, and that's mostly a result of being fixated on habits in my own life. If you can change your habits, you can change who you are. So I pay very little attention to rare occurrences and work on my habits constantly.
If you break your wrist or your knee, it screws up your life immediately, and likely does some damage to you for the long-term. You'll probably have somewhat lower peak athletic capacity, and have to be more cautious around the once-damaged area.
That's obvious in the case of a large trauma, but less obvious are the everyday actions we take that have ripple effects throughout our lives.
Taking the time to clear the decks of distractions, clean up and either finish or officially cancel old projects, making incremental improvements to diet, learning minor time-saving techniques that add up (keyboard shortcuts, typing faster, etc)... the gains to these are largely invisible, but they have a positive ripple effect going into the future.
If you have a great idea on Tuesday, you might not attribute it to being better rested and sharper-thinking because of dietary and sleep hygiene changes you made a few weeks before. But indeed, the ideas that are most useful to us are the ones right at the edge of our problemsolving ability.
The flipside is the debt you build up from bad choices in passing. Since quitting fried and microwaved food a while back, I noticed better energy levels. How many times have I been able to avoid a stupid argument or deadlock because I was slightly healthier and clearer-thinking? I've been 100% consistent with my fitness regime. How much of that is attributable to better sleep? Or, phrase differently -- how many more arguments would I have had, and how much more often would my positive habits have broken down if I'd been eating fried foods and sleeping more poorly?
