To Make Your Goals a Reality, Start by Quitting

Crafting New Year goals is easy.  Creating the new habits and behaviors to make your dreams come true is hard.  More than 21 days hard.  If you really want to make your goals a reality, start with quitting a bunch of stuff that’s not working.

Making Goals a Reality Takes Time

Fact is, the belief that it takes 21 days to create a new habit is a myth.  “The 21 day myth may well come from a book published in 1960 by a plastic surgeon” says psychologist Jeremy Dean, author of Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don’t, and How to Make Any Change Stick.” 

That plastic surgeon, Dr. Maxwell Maltz, noticed that amputees took, on average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb and he argued that people take 21 days to adjust to any major life changes.”

But, according to a study, it takes an average of 66 days to create a new habit.

And if you’re going for “mastery”, then expect it to take 10,000 hours, which turns into 5 or more years.