DOWNSCALE to Build Habits WITHOUT Burning Out

Hey amorteurs,

Welcome to the Friday edition of the Amateur newsletter, where we offer one potentially good idea to help you reach your creative potential.

New Year is approaching, so I'm sharing my best tip for habit-building in this edition.

Let's get started.

Trying to Build Habits But Burning Out?

2022 has passed, and a new year is approaching.

If you're anything like me, you have experience attempting to build new habits. And if you're anything like me, you have experienced failing to build those new habits.

And the cycle continues. The New Year gives us all a good excuse to give the ol' hamster wheel a spin again.

But that leaves the actual process up in the air again, and like juggling knives, we owe it to ourselves to not get cut.

If you're like me, you're sick of burning out and going nowhere. So, what's the solution?

The Default: Ramping Up Motivation

The conventional approach is to ramp up motivation.

There are many approaches. Maybe you:

• Join an accountability group

• Watch a lot of motivation videos or read a lot of motivation books

• Make a contract with yourself

The ways are endless. If we fail to build a habit, we must not want it enough. We must not have tried hard enough.

What does that result?

The Behavior is Still Too Difficult

The habit still fails to build.

We quit a few days in or, if we're lucky, a few weeks in.

All that motivation eventually fizzles out in the face of time and inconvenience. See, motivation comes in waves. It's unreliable and complicated. We know this, but what other options do we have?

We try again and again. This New Year, we have another shot at the prize.

Is it time to kindle the motivation fire again? Or is there another easier, simpler way to build new habits that stick?

There is.

An Unconventional Approach That Makes Habit Building Easy and Simple

The answer?

DOWNSCALING.

If you've seen me on Twitter, this is the idea I am most known for.

Instead of focusing on altering the motivation axis, there's a much more reliable thing we can control:

The difficulty.

Here's a good example.

This is a story of two people. No, this is not a sales letter.

They both join Twitter and follow two different strategies respectively:

1. Person A writes 1 tweet every week.

2. Person B writes 5 tweets every day.

Now, if you had to bet pure pesos on which new creator succeeds faster, who would you bet on?

If you said Person B, you wouldn't be wrong.

But what if I added another dimension to the space? Which new creator would you bet is still creating one year from now?

Given the compounding nature of the long-term game, who do you think would still be successful?

This illustrates the underrated concept that simply staying in the game long enough outweighs most short-lived sprints.

Downscaling any habit, whether it's

• Exercising

• Writing

• Studying

Increases the chances it'll stick through the storms of life.

The idea is, eventually, you can scale it.

Remember: with every habit, make it easy.

Cheers, internauts.

P.S. If you're hungry for more on this, here are a few primer resources to get you started:

And a few of my own tweets on the topic:

Thanks for reading this newsletter. You have my greatest appreciation.

If you haven't already:

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