Identity-based habits (and other dead birds)

This post is killing three birds with one stone, so to speak (though not the 'Three Little Birds'). I'm not writing ABOUT something, so much as I'm writing to write about some things.

BIRD ONE
I recently downloaded (or uploaded, or subscribed to, or whatever) Pocket. It was previously known as Read It Later, and is an application and web service for managing a reading list of articles from the Internet. It comes from the developers of Mozilla Firefox (the browser I use). I check it a lot at work and is a fairly good source for interesting and informative articles. So far, so good.

BIRD TWO
One such article I found particularly interesting was written by a guy named James Clear. I don't know a lot about him, but he says his work covers a broad range of topics like psychology, productivity, and health, and the central thread that ties it all together is building better habits. He calls himself a 'habit scientist' who is trying to answer the question, "How can we live better?" I kind of like that.

BIRD THREE (the big one)
James sent me what he referred to as a couple "articles." One is a 50-pager that I'd call more of a book. It deals with transforming our habits. Around p. 20 he starts talking about the power of "identity-based habits/goals," as opposed to performance-based or appearance-based. He says this:

The key to building lasting habits is focusing on creating a new identity first. Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity. What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are (either consciously or subconsciously). To change your behavior, you need to start believing new things about yourself.

So, instead of thinking in terms of "I'd like to look thinner," or "I'd like to be stronger," we need instead to think about the type of person we'd like to be. For instance, instead of thinking, "I want to lose weight"... become the type of person who moves more every day. Then follow it up with a small win and celebrate. Would you like to be a better writer? Think in terms of becoming the type of person who writes 1,000 words every day. Your small win could be writing a paragraph a day for a week.

I haven't read the entire article, but that last little bit there is what this is actually all about. There is still a part of me that wants to be a writer - not for money or notoriety, but just because I like to write. So this post was inspired by James as a way of taking a small step towards writing when I didn't think I had anything to write about. And look what happened... :)

So there ya have it, folks. Three dead birds in the pocket of James Clear, and I lived to write about it!