Anchor Hobbies Make Lasting Habits

I think lasting habits start with genuine hobbies. It’s not what a billionaire does, a book prescribes or what your boss tells you to do.

Habit Porn

Everyone is obsessed about building new habits and new systems. Waking up at 5am, intermittent fasting, answering emails once a day, etc. There are countless books written by people on the X number of habits to be successful, effective, and what not.

The large number of such books that exist and continue to get pumped out makes me think people are searching for some kind of ultimate habit list to take care of them for the rest of their life. The proverbial "get rich quick” fairy tale.

Instead of looking to be told what habits to have, I think the true problem persists in the ability to make anything into a true habit. Something that is so integrated into our system that it becomes second nature. Something that will be upheld for decades (if we so wish).

I started thinking about the things I do. The habits in my system and what got me started down the path of adding all these elements into my life. Why and where does the obsession to start new habits and persist on with existing ones come from?

I started asking myself: Why do I fast? Why do I insist on getting enough sleep, why do I ruthlessly create free time in my calendar, why do I read every day, why do I train 5-6x a week?

What about things that haven't become habits? Or things that I don't necessarily do everyday but periodically? Is there a top 3, 5 or 10 list of habits I have? Why do I continue to create new habits? Why do I think about updating them and continuing to develop them as well? All for what purpose?

Three Anchors (H.W.W)

What I've concluded on is that it's tied to my desires to be healthier, wealthier and wiser.

"Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" - Benjamin Franklin

This has been a cornerstone principle of everything I do and this has led to the hobbies I created. Focusing on building a hobby (i.e. project, venture, passion whatever your word is) that allows me to be healthy, wealthy and wise.

If Ben Franklin isn't your cup of tea, then maybe this will work for you:

"Find three hobbies: one that makes you money, one that makes you fit and one that makes you smarter" - Naval Ravikant

In the pursuit of all three I've developed hobbies. They've become the anchor to tack on a bunch of habits to over time. It’s not too dissimilar from how some software companies add-on products to their core offering.

My Anchors

My health habit is powerlifting. It started with going to train 3x a week with a pure goal of wanting to be stronger. Then it became 4x a week. Then it became 5-6x when I started adding mobility and cardio days because I wanted to be a better lifter and that meant doing more than just lifting heavy things (surprise).

That led to continuous experiments with diets like no fast food for years, no pop for 10+ years, or reading white papers on fasting (day 380 and counting). The list of habits I've enlisted as a result of this core anchor habit are endless. It’s not even about being stronger anymore.

Same can be said about my hobby to be wealthy. It started with wanting to just do something that put me at the center of human interaction. This led to business and accounting. Value investing became the big focus for a good portion of early adulthood and everything I did from reading, waking up early, and sleeping better, were all tied to wanting to become a better investor. Now this hobby has evolved to my own entrepreneurial journey of combining human performance and investing.

The hobby for getting wiser is just learning every day. Sometimes it's periods of preferring podcasts over music or goals like reading two books a month (an aspirational goal I stick to). It's a continued emphasis on learning every day. This teaches me how to structure time and how to create space in my mind and life to allow for better learning as well.

Many times, habits will crossover and benefit other hobbies. Sometimes it's chance but most times it’s part of the design since who wouldn't want to parallel process everything?

Find Hobbies. Habits Will Come

This got me thinking that people shouldn't be so obsessed with making something a habit (reading every day or waking up early). All that will be meaningless without tying it back to something they love doing (a kind of why/purpose). Habits are mere systematic inputs to let us do something we love for longer, and do it better.

With that, I believe the most important step would be to identify the hobbies we truly like. Something we genuinely enjoy. Only one of them (the wealthy one) need make us money. The other two (healthy and wise) may help with our growth as humans in our own weird ways.

I often tell people powerlifting got me started as an accountant, and looking for a career that had all the attributes to powerlifting got me into investing. I fell in love with investing and that got me into building a habit of reading to become wiser every day. As I learned more, it became obvious my love for investing could be applied to other areas outside of directly working for a hedge fund. Hobbies have a tendency of evolving with us.

Experiment with different hobbies and we’ll find things we want to get better at. People are creatures of habit and we naturally like doing things we enjoy and we enjoy things we are good at. It's a continuous cycle of wanting to do more of what we like, getting better and enjoying it more.

So, maybe the focus isn't habits but hobbies. Without hobbies, the habits alone may have no meaning.