What did I learn from goal setting?

At the end of last year (2017), I was watching a video on Youtube about goals and how they are important to set if you want to live a happy and successful life, on the same video the speaker mentioned how important it is to start goal setting by limiting your social media use and if possible, to delete your Facebook. So as a sort of New Year’s resolution I told myself I’d set some goals and I jumped straight into the deep end and deleted my social media apps from my phone and long story short I achieved all the goals I wanted to and I’m successful as fuck.

But in all seriousness, there I was downloading Instagram back onto my phone 2 days later because I needed to stalk people and waste 3 hours a day on memes, next thing I knew Facebook is back on my phone and I have completely failed myself. Luckily in the same resolution I told myself that I would read 20 books by the end of 2018, a small number I know but considering I was averaging 2-3 books a year over the previous years, that was a monumental change for me. I can honestly say that I stuck to my goal right up until today, trying to consume as much information through books and turns out I have reached my goal before the end of the year. I achieved this goal by finding ways to have my book on me, for instance I started taking the train to work in order to fit more reading in and when I was eating breakfast, I’d have it at a table, so I could read whilst eating. I built up reading habits without even knowing it, little did I know that was going to be the key to my success with how to spend less time on my phone. By having these reading habits, I was starting to check my social media less and less, until about March (so 3 months into my resolution) I deleted Facebook completely from my phone and I haven’t looked back. Instagram however is a vice harder to shake than heroin for me, maybe one day I’ll be able to get rid of it, but until that day I’m going to be on there smashing memes and stalking people I used to go to High School with that I never had the courage to speak to back then. I’ve heard of some surefire ways to stop social media use, but it involves being banished to the shadow realm with what we now call a “dumb phone”, you know the ones drug dealers and grandmas use. I for one like having an okay camera, google maps and my emails coming in without having to look at a PC. Crazier (by my standards) things started to happen as my reading habits developed, I noticed I would start cooking dinner and lunch for the next day, so my diet started improving which started to positively affect my mood and energy levels. The extra energy I had left over after work allowed me to go to the gym 3 times a week, and still do to this day I go to the gym 2-3 times a week – I’m feeling great.

From what I can gather from my experiment with admittedly, a very small sample size, that once I developed a strong habit regarding my reading, this trickled down to my ability to create other habits in my brain, hence why I started cooking and then going to gym. Therefore, if you take anything from reading this, take this away: try to create habits in your brain, start small and then eventually it will be easier for you to create more complex habits and even replace negative ones.