POST16: Habit of writing is more challenging than I thought

Jun 20, 2025

POST16: Habit of writing is more challenging than I thought

Over several weeks, I am struggling to come back to writing. I think my challenge with developing a habit of writing, which I set out to post at least once a week, is I want to get it perfect but fail to express myself clearly and detailed. Though I understand that perfection is not always good and sometimes I just need to sit down and write, even if it’s a short writing without any details. Clearly, it’s one of my weaknesses that I acknowledge and I think I need to work on it.

So, yesterday while running in Botanical Garden, I was listening to Huberman Lab’s podcast on Spotify, episode about Goals Toolkit: How to set and achieve your goals - where he describes science-based protocols to set and achieve goals in a way that maximizes the likelihood of reaching them. For those of you who don’t know who is Andrew Huberman, he is neuroscientist that talks about cool stuff like productivity, brain function and many other fields.

My primary takeaways (I am paraphrasing some interesting moments for myself in my own words) from the podcast that I related and reflected from my current situation are:

Write your goals and pick one priority goal to work on. If you have bunch of goals that increases likelihood of failing to achieve any of them. Lately, I have been having too many goals and taking few actions toward any of them. I need to reevaluate my goals and probably define one or two that I really want and just focus on them, instead of going after too many goals.

Most people mistakenly believe that if the goal is easy it’s is easy to achieve.

In order to learn something, we have to shift our nervous system into states that are somewhat uncomfortable.

Good timeline to achieve a goal is 12 week period or about 3 months (quarterly cycle). Three months goals are tend to be more effective compared to monthly goals or yearly goals. I need to experiment with one of my goals to see how it works for me.

Specificity and measurability are two vital elements in goal settings.

Define verbs to pursue your goals and determine how often you repeat them to yourself when working on your goal.

Posting goals on a sticky note is not effective. That’s because our vision system adapts to whatever is regular in your environment. Anything that shows up regularly in our visual environment gets canceled out. Instead move it’s location in random places.

Ask yourself “Do I really want to do this (action toward achieving your goal) today?”. If the answer is yes then spending 1 to 3 or 5 minutes visualizing achieving of the outcome and emotions associated (positive visualization) with it prior to performing the action, …. If the answer is no (when you have hard time or have to push yourself), then positive visualization is not going to be effective. Instead spending 1 to 3 minutes visualizing the failure outcome increases the likelihood of motivating you.

Tim Ferris’s 30 things he wish he knew when he was 20 years old (need to check it on Instagram). I don’t know what those are yet.

Knowing and accepting that it’s normal to face difficulties or being lost in your pursuit of your goals.

By listening to Huberman I decided I will start visualizing the moment of failure when I am not into the mood of writing. I have read so many blogs with short (one or two paragraphs) that the author just wrote for the sake of writing which helped them to be consistent and hone their writing skills. I hope I can do this too, though several past weeks I have been failing misearably.

If you want to listen to the whole podcast you can find it here:

Goals Toolkit: How to Set & Achieve Your Goals

In this episode, I describe science-based protocols to set and achieve your goals in a way that maximizes the likelihood of reaching them.