Traditional methods of habit formation often involve setting grand goals, such as working out for one hour every day or reading a hundred pages of a book. These goals may seem full of motivation and determination, but during the implementation process, people often give up the whole plan because the difficulty is too high.

Micro-habits are completely different. It emphasizes starting from goals that are so tiny that it’s almost impossible to fail. For example, doing just one push-up, reading one page of a book, or writing fifty words every day. Such goal-setting greatly lowers the threshold for taking action. Since the tasks are easy, they hardly require much mental preparation and willpower to get started. When we easily complete these tiny goals, we will get a sense of accomplishment. This sense of accomplishment will motivate us to keep going and gradually form the inertia of a habit.

Taking fitness as an example, starting with doing one push-up every day, this simple movement is almost within everyone’s ability. After completing that one push-up, you may feel like you want to do more. As time goes by, when your body gets used to the rhythm of this exercise, you can gradually increase the difficulty and the time, such as increasing it to doing five or ten push-ups every day, and eventually form a regular fitness habit.

In terms of developing the reading habit, reading one page of a book every day is a piece of cake. Maybe while opening the book and reading that one page, we will be attracted by the content of the book and involuntarily read a few more pages. With long-term persistence, the reading volume will gradually accumulate, the reading speed will improve, and the ability to understand and perceive books will also be enhanced. From barely reading one page originally to actively exploring more knowledge later, reading will become a natural habit.

Micro-habits are not set in stone either. As time passes, when we can continuously and steadily complete the initially set micro-goals, we can appropriately increase the task volume, but the increase should not be too large, always keeping it within a range that is slightly challenging but not overwhelming.

Micro-habits are feasible and easy to execute. They make the formation of habits no longer a painful and difficult thing, but gradually accumulate through one tiny success after another, and finally achieve a leap from quantitative change to qualitative change, enabling us to unconsciously possess better self-discipline habits.