Three powerful lessons I’ve learned doing 100-day challenges based on The Lean Startup and Atomic Habits.
I really couldn’t get up in the morning but when I started to use a 100-day challenge with short experiments, it suddenly became much easier for me to jump out of bed every day at the same time.
It gave me a rush of excitement to work on myself and improve that bad habit of snoozing and over-sleeping every day by connecting the dots between the Lean startup, Atomic habits, and a 100-day challenge.
For those of you who don’t know these three concepts, here’s a short introduction in just one sentence and a quote. If you’re familiar, feel free to skip ahead.
The Lean startup
The Lean Startup is all about learning and adapting your product or service by starting as small as possible with a Minimal Viable Product and Build, Measure, Learn and keep repeating that loop.
“Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop.” — Eric Ries in The Lean Startup
I’m happy to have been a part of some startups who used The Lean Startup approach to build a successful product and company. When it comes to habits, I’ve been using and incorporating the Lean Startup feedback loop and the pivot mechanism into defining and growing my habits.
Atomic habits
If you haven’t read Atomic Habits, Go for it. It’s an amazing book and a great summary of a lot of subjects which will help you better understand habits and how to build them. But in the essence, it’s about starting small, really small.
“If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.” — James Clear in Atomic Habits
First, build the ‘trigger’ or simply the moment on the day that you choose to execute your habit, make that moment count, and simply show up and grow your habit from that point forward. Make building your habit boring. Maybe boring sounds bad, but it works! Luckily there are enough not-so-boring things that could use your attention when fusing it together with The Lean Startup in your challenge.
100-day challenge
Maybe you’ve already done or joined one or a few 100-day challenges. They’re quite popular on the internet for meditation, writing, no sugar or coffee... It’s a great basic concept and framework to help you use a steady rhythm on the journey towards your goal.
“A 100-day challenge is a great basic concept and framework to help you use a steady rhythm on the journey towards your goal. Besides that, there’s the magic of the timespan. It’s not too long so you can’t see light at the end of the tunnel yet it’s not too short, like a week or a month, to really effectuate change and feel the results”
Why do I love 100-day habit challenges? It’s quite simple really, first of all, the math. When you divide a hundred by ten, you get ten. If you use every ten days for a phase of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, you’ve created a solid foundation and a system to realize your goal in ever-changing circumstances. You’re ready to handle the unexpected.
Lesson 1: Break out of the week cycle
The other reason why I love the 100-day challenges is that the 10-day breakdown prevents you from using the 7-day weekly schedule which has too many ‘old habits’ (who die hard) like when you’re tired on Friday night or slow on Mondays. This way you use the phases of the Build-Measure-Learn every ten days to grow your small habit in a steady rhythm to a full-grown and lasting habit.
The four phases
When fusing together the Lean Startup, Atomic Habits into a 100-day challenge I’ve discovered the following phases:
- Phase Zero — Find your Minimal Viable Habit
- Phase One — Build and start extremely simple
- Phase Two — Measure to Grow your habit
- Phase Three — Learn and prepare
If you want to run a 5K — start by putting on your running shoes.
Phase Zero — Find your minimal Viable Habit
I’ve learned that it’s important to fail early and fail often by experimenting enough before you’re truly ready to build your habit. If you want to meditate, try different times, locations, durations, and try to relax. Even better: You can start with this today, so quit procrastination and start with doing. You’ll use the lessons you’ve learned in this phase to define the smallest version of your habit. If you want to run a 5K, start by putting on your running shoes.
Lesson 2: Fail Early and Fail Often
A Dutch Social Network from the early days, called Hyves, used an alternative to this approach to deliver new features. They called it: ‘ship early, ship often’. This way they didn’t gold-plated until the idea was perfect, but they released rough versions of the platform’s features and iterated quickly on that. For habits, the same applies to trying and failing, since you’ll only learn by experience. Theory or other people’s experiences sometimes seems like the perfect solution but we need to take action to learn. We can only really understand by experiencing it ourselves.
“People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.” — Paulo Coelho
Phase One — Build and start simple
In the next phase, or the first ten days of your 100-day challenge you build your habit. As a result of phase zero, you’ve got your simple starting action. Use these ten days to figure out the next steps on how to build your habit while showing up every day.
Lesson 3: Always be Rebooting
Once you’ve gone through phase zero and one, you’re ready to grow and sharpen your habit over time. You’ve got 90 days left, use these to repeat both phases four times. Every time you start a new phase, you work on a different part of your habit and that gives you a great opportunity to reboot, to let it feel like you’re starting again, starting better this time, to feel the energy you feel on January first when you’ve just pledged your New Year’s Resolution.
Phase Two — Measure to Grow your Habit
Once you’ve got the baseline down it’s time to grow and measure your habit. Start small, with just one step a day, mediate another minute, do one extra pushup, take your cold shower just ten seconds longer. You’ll notice that it’s boring and that the growth is slow however, you also notice the possibility of infinite grow which is amazing and also sustainable! Keep a sharp eye on the ‘compound interest’, if you grow your pushups one at a time, you’ve already done an impress fifty-five pushups after just ten days of growing!
Phase Three — Learn and prepare
Don’t grow too fast but make it last. This next phase is all about preparation, so you’ll go steady for ten days. Just do a ten-minute walk, ten pushups, a one minute and forty seconds cold shower, and so on. By going steady for ten days you’re able to observe and dive deep, check on your form. The excitement of growth, and getting bigger is now swapped with the intrigue of boredom. Look beyond and find the insights that help you pivot and grow better in the next phase.
Last but not least — just keep going
After ninety days and four times phases two and three you can use the last ten days to just keep going, finish your habit building, celebrate, be proud and look at the total compound of what you’ve done! After that, just keep doing it or use another 100-day challenge to grow even harder, better, faster, stronger.
Are you ready to experiment, define, execute, and improve your next habit? I’d love to know what habit you’d like to build and which goals you want to achieve, let me know in the comment below!
Ps. In the next few weeks, I’ll be building my new ‘power-down habit’ and document the four phases live here on Medium. Follow me @bemorehabits on Medium to be the first to read it!
