The foundation to live a good life
Many people mistakenly believe that a solid foundation is simply the result of having good habits. While habits are important, focusing solely on them can overlook both the immediate needs for self-improvement and the long-term challenges of sustaining change.
But what are habits? A habit is a behavior that becomes partly automatic, requiring minimal effort or thought. However, most actions can’t be fully automated—some decision-making always requires attention.
For example, driving starts as a conscious effort but eventually becomes second nature, though it still needs focus to avoid accidents. Similarly, habits like exercising or eating well become easier over time, but they rarely run entirely on autopilot.
Habits alone often aren’t enough to sustain long-term change to your personal foundation.
What else is needed to make changes last?
If effortless habits aren’t enough for lasting change in your foundation, what else is required? Several psychological factors help sustain long-term behavior changes, including:
Knowledge
Understanding the right actions supports motivation and decision-making. For example, someone who understands investing is more likely to grow wealth than someone who views it as gambling.
Self-efficacy
While habits are automatic, self-efficacy is the conscious belief in your ability to act. People confident in their ability to exercise regularly can adapt to new routines more easily because they find it manageable and enjoyable.
Rules
We all have personal standards for behavior, even if unspoken. For instance, someone might indulge in junk food but refuse hard drugs. These self-imposed rules guide behavior across various situations.
Courage
Fear often stems from unconscious threat-detection systems. These threats surface as fears and anxieties, even when we can’t explain their source. Facing these fears in low-risk situations can gradually make taking action for a change in our foundation easier.
Systems
Implementing structured tools, like GTD for productivity or a calendar for managing commitments, reduces the mental load of constant decision-making. Just as it’s easier to use notes than memorize text, systems help automate good behaviors, freeing your brain from doing all the work.
Identity
Our self-image influences the behaviors we adopt. Identity often follows behavior—how we see ourselves is shaped by what we do. For instance, an athlete recovering from injury still views themselves as an athlete, making the return to fitness a natural goal. Identity can help sustain change even when habits falter.
In summary, lasting change requires more than automatic behaviors. It takes knowledge to guide actions, self-efficacy to believe in them, systems and rules for decision-making, courage to face fears, and a shift in identity to maintain progress despite life’s challenges.
Why taking a broader view of change matters for the foundation to live a good life
This might seem obvious—most advocates of habit change don’t deny the importance of other factors like knowledge, courage, or systems. However, recognizing these nuances helps us understand how change is truly motivated and sustained.
Take public speaking, for example. Since each speech is different, much of the skill can’t be fully automated. Regular practice reduces stage fright, but the key to improving is courage, not habit.
Exposure therapy works best when you vary the settings to build a sense of safety, unlike habit formation, which focuses on consistency to encourage automaticity.
In this case, the goal isn’t to form a habit, but to reduce fear. So, it’s often better to overcommit at first—speaking more frequently than you plan to in the long term—to dramatically reduce anxiety, rather than treating it like a slow-building habit.
Similarly, areas like productivity and personal finance are sustained through knowledge and systems, not just habits. A system that requires frequent rote actions is often poorly designed rather than efficient.
We often approach self-improvement poorly, either by misjudging the type of change required or by overlooking how factors beyond habits, like courage, systems, and identity, contribute to sustaining long-term progress in our foundation.
In the end, the most important knowledge is self-knowledge—because it’s through understanding ourselves that all other learning becomes possible to make the foundation to live a good life work.
