Jessica Harper Uncanceled

“Pop science” books seem to be increasingly popular. You know the sort of thing: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, the latter of which’s big takeaway was that you must do something (the right way) for at least 10,000 hours to become expert at it (that’s why I’m an expert at drinking Chardonnay). It set out to shatter the myth that high achievers must have an innate talent. It’s more a question of putting in the hours, argued Gladwell.

Usually you can just read an article about these books to get the gist, as they tend to have one or two big ideas and then a lot of padding. I don’t need dozens of examples backing up their theses: you’ve done the research, guys, I trust you.

One of these books has really changed my life this year. Its lesson is almost embarrassingly obvious but clearly I – and many other readers – needed a reminder of it. The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy talks about the power of daily habits (the message is repeated in Atomic Habits by James Clear; the books are very similar so take your pick). 

Darren Hardy’s advice is this: pick a skill you want to improve and do it every day for 10 minutes and then stop. This will quickly become a habit and you will want to do it for longer, given that it’s getting easier, you can see improvement (and the next big milestone coming up) and you’re thinking: as I’m doing this anyway, I might as well do it for a little longer. And hey presto, a habit forms after 21 days and you’re off to the races.

He also says you should try to go the extra mile, eg try to tag on an extra bit of activity each session as this can make a big difference to the final result. I have borne this in mind and when I reach my daily goal of writing 1,000 words I try to keep going until I’ve hit at least 1,200 (or have walked an extra lap around the lake in our park, when I’m doing my daily exercise). Every five days I clock up an extra 1,000 words, which is not insignificant, even if you’re writing an 80,000 word novel, and I’ve walked an extra 5km. 

The rest of the book is about actually forming the habit. The benefit of making something a habit is that you don’t have to prepare for it or put aside extra time for it, it’s just what you do each day, in the same way you just eat breakfast or read a book before you go to sleep.

I can see the huge advantages of daily habits as it took me a crazy four years to write my first novel and four and a half to write the second (they were both unpublished, if you wonder where the hell they are). 

But then this year – newly motivated by how much progress I could make if I wrote 1,000 words per day – I wrote a book in seven months. And I’ve dusted off the longlist of ideas I would turn into novels if I had the time, ie if it didn’t take me nearly five years. Well, now I’m planning on writing a lot of them as I know I can finish the job at a greatly accelerated rate.

I’ve applied the same technique to learning Spanish in 2023 (I bought a great course back in January). I’ve not practised every day: sometimes it’s been say four days a week, sometimes none, but my dashboard tells me I have completed 56% and that means I’ve notched up about 28 hours of learning. I will probably complete the course around March, which is pretty pleasing considering I have been trying to learn off and on since high school.

Darren Hardy makes a terrific observation when he says that setting deadlines or new year’s resolutions don’t work; you “set” them and then pretty much always forget about them because they are not front and center in your mind. But doing something every day removes the need for deadlines as the achievements take care of themselves: if you’re doing an activity every day, they can’t help but do so.

The micro gains or “compound effects” of small, daily habits have astonished me this year. Let’s say you did just twenty minutes of teaching yourself to code five days a week: that’s 86 hours a year! Picture 86 hours now and it seems a wonderfully big vat of time to devote to a skill. And at the end of that year, instead of looking back on a trail of forgotten deadlines as usual, you’ll be congratulating yourself on some impressive achievements.