The habits that changed my life (and how I built them)

back in college i had a nickname which was the procrastination queen i would essentially just not do anything until like two days before an exam or an assignment in which i had enough guilt and anxiety and really just like self-hatred uh so that would actually motivate me enough to get started and i would do whatever i have to do in a panic and then either submit an assignment or do the exam and it was really sad because during that amount of time i wasn't actually enjoying myself you know i i would feel really guilty i would just be like watching anime we're just like sometimes even just like laying in bed and doing nothing the entire day and that would make me feel terrible i didn't feel productive i didn't feel useful and i had so much guilt because i wasn't doing anything with it and i also wasn't going to class so it was pretty much time that was just being wasted and it wasn't like i didn't have any goals or like things that i wanted to do i had so many things i wanted to try do but none of it ever happened i would just be laying there feeling guilty and never actually do anything to start achieving my goals and then i read some productivity books such as atomic habits and my entire life changed and everything became wonderful just kidding i wish it was that easy however it did set things into motion i learned a lot of things about productivity but what really stuck out the most to me was the idea of building systems of habits that align with the person who you want to be what i realized that it wasn't me that was a failure it was my systems like my habits that let me down my habits were terrible and that was the thing that was hindering me from achieving the goals that i wanted to achieve so i knew i had to build systems of habits that would put me in a position where i can actually achieve my goals but it was so much easier said than done it actually took me five years until all these habits that i built started paying off and i actually saw a noticeable difference in my life so for those of you who are struggling with this right now understand that systems and habits they're not like gonna magically happen and it also takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to break bad habits too in this video i'm going to evaluate the systems of habits i built into my life that can be broadly broken into three categories of career learning and life so for each of these habits first i'll talk about what the habit is and how it aligns towards the person who i want to be sucking is how i manage to form the habit and why i think it works for me and third how much it affects my life

first category is career for those of you who don't know me let me first give a really quick background of my career so i started off as a pharmacology undergraduate and i was pre-med until i decided that i didn't want to be a doctor anymore and then i got a job in bioinformatics research did my master's in computer science and now i'm a data scientist at a fan company intact so the first habit in the career section

is get a job to get a job quite confusing isn't it let me explain so right around end of senior year i finally realized that i didn't actually want to become a doctor so i thought okay maybe i'll just go into bioinformatics so i was like okay okay um i took these two classes in python in my final year and i didn't actually learn anything because i wasn't really paying attention so i'm gonna like actually learn how to code i can go get a job in bioinformatics so i tried doing that right like i would i read some books you know i like did some courses and stuff but it just didn't stick i would do like a course or something for two weeks and then i would just give up and then i'll do another one and then i would give up and i just never really got anywhere but just by chance i had a friend who was talking about the research professor that he was working with and they were hiring someone to do some bioinformatics type things but it would be an unpaid volunteer research shop so i jumped at that position they hired me because i was not even getting paid so it was like zero risk to them and that job really helped me focus on what to actually learn and also gave me a sense of responsibility because even though i wasn't being paid i was expected to deliver this to someone who is higher up than me right like i gave my word that i would do it so i have to do it i was able to learn all the things i needed to get that project done and i did my deliverable and after doing all that i felt like i had an inkling of what data science feels like i obviously still didn't know that much about data science but this like kind of pseudo job that i got it gave me a project to do which forced me to actually learn things and gave me that experience i also have a project now on my portfolio and i also had a research professor like that professor's name that i could use on my resume then i started applying to other bioinformatics jobs like proper bioinformatics jobs and i convinced a professor to hire me there so this is like an actual proper job of bioinformatics where the professor would actually pay me and when i started on a job i realized again that i didn't actually know anything the entire lab was working in r and i did not know any r at all so i had to teach myself r and it was also up to another level because the work i was doing is directly contributing towards having a paper published so there's like a very high bar of standard that was being set so i also had to learn how to actually do data science properly i quickly learned on the job um again that social accountability was there and also this professor was paying me so i couldn't just like leave right um so all of that added together it helped me focus on learning the things i needed to learn so that i could achieve my project and do these things properly and also deliver to my professor so that he would not hire me when i got that proper bioinformatics job that was when i truly realized the power of this habit of getting a job to get a job it's a way of allowing me to focus on a project and learn the actual things that needed to be learned instead of being overwhelmed with information it had social accountability that was being built into it so i couldn't just give up when things got hard and i would also get paid for it which is quite nice after realizing this i repeated this cycle several times until i eventually ended up now as a data scientist in terms of the impact this habit has had in my life i would rate it five out of five it's the habit that really kick-started my career and i think if i haven't implemented this habit i would not be where i am right now so if you're in a similar position of wanting to change your career or to fast-track your career i think this is a really powerful habit all right happy number two under the career category is the one thing i have to give credit

to kenji whose channel i will link in the descriptions he was the one that recommended this book called the one thing uh which talks all about what this one thing is but to summarize it's basically focusing each day on only doing a single task the task that is the most important for that day instead of being scatter-minded and then trying to like run around do a bunch of different things this habit has been very helpful because my lifestyle these days i have a lot of things that are going on i have my like real job i also have like youtube stuff and i have courses i'm making like a bunch of different things that are happening and i found myself very scattered and doing a bunch of different things and not actually focusing on doing the things that matter the most and i wanted to build this habit because it would be something that aligned with my idea of becoming more productive and becoming more intentional with my time so that i can achieve the things that i want to achieve instead of having one single thing i actually have two things technically one thing is non-work related so it could be like my trading stuff youtube related or course related which is like not job related and the second thing that i have every day is something that is job related the split works for me because i would do that one non-job related thing before i start work and then when i started work i would be focusing on that one thing for my job it did take a little bit of trial or error to get that kind of tweaked version of two separate things and the way in which i would actually get this habit to stick is that i would write those two separate things either on my window so like every time i look at the window i would be staring at it where i would put a sticky on my laptop so in this way you know i'll be like distracted or whatever may go i should check some emails and then i look up i'm like that's the one thing that i was supposed to do and then i would go do that in terms of impact my life i would rate this three out of five it has helped me be less stressed out um in trying to figure out what it is i'm supposed to do and it's also made me more focused and intentional on the thing that is the most important on that day i would recommend trying to build this habit for people who have a lot of different things on their plate alright

alright second category is the category of learning new things is a very important value to me i find that i'm the happiest when i'm learning something new every day i think it's also quite handy to learn different things and be able to synthesize that information and apply it to different fields however learning new things is pretty hard and i think that's mainly for three different reasons the first one is that it's hard to carve out time to actually consistently learn something because you have so many other things that are going on in your life the second reason is that when you first start learning something it can feel really overwhelming because you're not sure what information that you should be learning and you know there's just like so many things that you're unsure about and the third reason is something that is known as the dip this is from a very nice little book called the dip and this is what it looks like your x-axis is your time and your like effort that you put in and the y-axis is the actual result and what you see is a curve that looks like this because in the beginning there's a lot of low-hanging fruits and it's like super fun and stuff so you spend a little bit of energy and time and you see a lot of results from it but at a certain point before you actually master that skill you kind of fall into this dip where you start realizing that there's a lot of fundamentals of that skill that you need to learn first before you can actually start advancing more and then you feel like you're not making that much progress because you have to establish that strong foundation of that skill first and then you know your results are not really showing any progress but you're putting in more effort and this is the place that a lot of people quit now the habit that i built to make learning new things a very consistent part of my life is by live streaming my study sessions i

live stream three times a week for 100 minutes or two pomodoros and i have to say that this is like one of my favorite habits that i've established because it just presses all my buttons in the right way i'm held extremely accountable in a social sense because i have a deep desire to not let other people down and since i'm announcing my live streams and other people join my live streams i have to go there i have to actually go to them right so it keeps me very accountable and i show up and then also the community that's being built around it is extremely inspiring since everybody is trying to learn stuff by doing this consistently for five or six months now it's actually become such a deeply ingrained habit of mine that i actually find myself like almost automatically just showing up to these live streams because i've just done it so many times now let's talk about the impact on my life i'll rate this four um i think it's not as significant as the five out of five which is my career stuff which was like huge changes in my life i think this is one of those things that over time is gonna become a five out of five because it's a perfect illustration of what is known as the one percent rule which is the fact that if you assume that you start at one right and you improve yourself by one percent 365 days which is a year you would actually be at 37. 78 that daily one percent improvement really adds up in comparison to if you stay the same you would still be at one and of course if you actually get worse by one percent every single day for an entire year you'll be at 0. 03 so as you can see that one percent of difference every day really starts adding up i'm learning something uh well not every single day but three days a week and over time i know it's something that's gonna start accumulating and it's gonna be something that's gonna pay huge dividends in the future if you wanna join these livestreams i will also post the link to study with tina's second channel where i post my live streams third category of life there's a lot that i was thinking about talking about this category so to make sure that the video isn't super long i'm only going to talk about two things the first one is exercise i don't think i

need to talk about why exercise is so good for you um for me the habit that i've established is by exercising at least three times a week this is a combination of biking for cardio as well as resistance training so how did i get this to work and why do i think it works this is one that has taken me quite a while to actually get down so i'm pretty proud of it like a lot of people um i was very inconsistent with exercising i would kind of go and then stop going for the past three or four years and i would just never consistently go to actually see results in both my body and in my mindset what i actually did to make it consistent though is a concept called chaining training is a concept that's about you have one habit that's already solidly established and then putting another habit immediately after that habit so that first habit kind of becomes a cue for the second half at the start so the way it works for me is that i live stream three times a week right and i chained this act of exercise right after i live stream so i'm very consistent in these live streams and then immediately after that i would either go for a bike ride or go for resistance training and over time that in itself has also become a habit by doing this over a period of time i also started seeing a lot more changes in both my body and my mindset and that in itself that seeing that progress is also kind of a feedback loop that makes me more motivated to keep doing this habit as well not to mention something kind of unintentional that happened was that now whenever i feel upset where i feel like just like kind of not great i automatically just want to go on a bike right now because i realize after going on a bike ride my brain just becomes a lot more calm and i usually have a plan of action for whatever it is that's frustrating me impact on life i would say it's a three out of five it's more of a subtle thing and this is one of those things that also takes quite a while to start showing but over the past few months by being more consistent with my exercising i've really started to notice a difference my mind is like clear i have more energy and i think i have better biceps now typing habit in the life category is having a separate space for a divider

for work i have this really intense relationship with my like i see my bed and it calls to me and i have to go on it and once i go on my bed no matter what i say i'm gonna do like no matter how i trick myself about how i'm going to study or do whatever this always happens just i don't know i just feel like i just kind of like melt into my bed and become one with my bed and either take a nap or just like watch anime like it literally happens every single time so in order to combat this a habit that i first started was that i would take a divider wait actually it's that divider over there now okay i started with like taking this divider and then i would move it so that i can no longer see my bed it's such a small thing but it made such a huge difference because i couldn't see it anymore i would actually like sit on my table and when i sit in my table i'm far more productive and i actually do the thing i'm supposed to be doing this will work like 80 of the time but then there's like just that 20 that would you know sometimes make me still go on my bed so after the pandemic started the housing prices started dropping a lot and i was actually able to grab another studio apartment a really cheap price at the building that i'm living in right now i now have a secondary space in which i do all my work in which is the space that you see right now by putting even more distance between me and my bed i would say it works like maybe ninety percent of the time now like the call of my bed is it's just really strong so i think 90 is already really good for me i think this is like a really interesting example it's one of those things where it's such a small change but it actually makes such a huge difference i would give it three out of five in terms of amount of impact it's had on my life it's definitely made me more productive and i think i've like done more work in the long run all right this wraps up this video i hope that this video was helpful for you and just illustrates how difficult it can be to establish a habit but how once you do and you figure out how to do it in your life it can have huge changes hope you guys enjoy this video and i will see you guys in the next live stream video