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Routines, patterns and habits are the invisible architects of our life, Toronto entrepreneur Jonathan Goodman says. Some serve us well. Others trap us in downward cycles we don’t recognize we’re caught in. They keep us from achieving our best in life.
“How many things are you currently doing that you don’t need to do but have always done and so mindlessly keep doing it?” he asks in his book Unhinged Habits.
To break free, you must seek uncertainty rather than organize for comfort. That means putting personal safety third on your list, after growth, which should hold the top spot, and, in second place, trying new experiences.
You don’t want to be reckless. But you must take calculated risks to embrace growth and joy. “Avoiding risk is itself the greatest risk,” he warns.
Explore the world, trying new things. Explore yourself. Take on this mindset:
- Uncertainty is an opportunity.
- Prolonged comfort is dangerous.
- Failure is information.
- Flexible intentions are better than rigid expectations.
- “I wonder what I might discover” is a better attitude than “I already know.”
- Ask naïve questions and drop preconceptions.
“Your life is not a predetermined path but an ongoing conversation between who you are and who you might become. Exploration is the language of that conversation,” he writes.
He accepts that consistency is important but pushes back on the increasing common assertion that consistency is the recipe for success. Lots of people are consistent without getting ahead. They wind up consistently mediocre.
One antidote is seasonality – intense, focused periods when you break the routine. Define the seasons of your life that you are in and others you wish to try out – things you want to explore or improve. Approach them with intensity – unhinged intensity. “Intensity is for gaining. Consistency is for maintaining,” he says. Use both, in wise combination.
He operates on an eight-to-four seasonality, leaving Toronto for four months in winter to explore himself and another country with his family, while also enjoying the remaining eight months back home. It need not be an eight-to-four pattern, but some such rhythm can be fruitful as you embrace contrast.
“What if true consistency isn’t about doing the same things every day but rather honouring the natural rhythms of intensity and recovery that our bodies and minds require?” he says, noting that our hunter-gatherer ancestors worked hard in spring, summer and fall but lived off the food they collected during winter.
Another approach is seasons of yes, in which you open yourself to serendipity. It’s based on a framework author James Clear calls hats, haircuts and tattoos. You are stuck with a haircut for a while after getting one. A tattoo is hard to reverse out of. But hats are easy to try on and take off.
“Most experiences you say yes to are merely hats to try on, yet you treat them like permanent tattoos – methodically overcompensating with a decision-making and fear-feeling process that’s too slow, too deliberate and too choosy, not because it’s the smart thing to do but because you’re scared,” Mr. Goodman writes.
So try a season of yes when you break out of routine. For a specific period, commit to saying yes to opportunities, invitations and experiences you would normally decline. He stresses it’s not a reckless abandonment of boundaries but a strategic expansion of your comfort zone to break entrenched patterns and discover new possibilities.
Invest 15 minutes daily for a month to read something completely unrelated to your industry. Or identify three skills adjacent to your expertise that you’ve never developed and then invest 10 days focused on each one. Or for one month, using a randomizer app, select one colleague to have lunch or coffee with each week and ask about their projects, approaches and perspectives. Or attend a different community event each week for five weeks and follow up with five people you meet.
Each is a simple challenge that breaks habits and propels you forward.
Quick hits
- The better your time-management system, the less time you will spend on social media and other apps designed to hold you engaged in less valuable activities, argues productivity writer and Georgetown University professor Cal Newport. That’s because you are working toward goals you find important and feel a satisfying sense of self-efficacy that fights off the urge for quick gratification from activities like glancing at your phone.
- Time management specialist Laura Vanderkam has added a “Golden Hours Intention” to her daily to-do list setting out something she could do in the evening for enjoyment, such as a 20-minute slot to play the piano or an hour to listen to a new podcast while on her treadmill.
- The Prism blog suggests if you want more agency in your life ask yourself what you would do if you had 10 times more agency – and just do it.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.