Personal Finance News Wednesday 1/9

Phil's Personal Finance Tip of the Day:

How to Achieve Your Goals with Healthy Habits

Written by Leo Babauta through Pick the Brain.com

Note: This is a guest post by Leo Babauta who blogs at Zen Habits about setting goals, creating habits, productivity, GTD, motivation, exercise and more.

We’ve all faced the disappointment and guilt that comes from setting a goal and giving up on it after a couple of weeks. Sustaining motivation for a long-term goal is hard to achieve, and yet the best goals can usually only be accomplished in a few months or even years.

Here’s the solution: Focus instead on creating a new habit that will lead to achieving your goal.

Want to run a marathon? First create the habit of running every day. Want to get out of debt and start saving? Create the habit of brown bagging it to work, or watching DVDs instead of going to the movies, or whatever change will lead to saving money for you.

By focusing not on what you have to achieve over the course of the next year, but instead on what you are doing each day, you are focusing on something achievable. That little daily change will add up to a huge change, over time … and you’ll be surprised at how far you’ve come in no time. Little grains of sand can add up to a mountain over time.

I used this philosophy of habit changes to run a marathon, to change my diet and lose weight, to write a novel, to quit smoking, to become organized and productive, to double my income, reduce my debt and start saving, and to begin training for an Olympic triathlon this year. It works, if you focus on changing habits.

Now, changing your habits isn’t easy — I won’t lie to you — but it’s achievable, especially if you start small. Don’t try to change the world with your first habit change … take baby steps at first. I started by just trying to run a mile — and by the end of the year, I could run more than 20 miles.

How do you change your habits? Focus on one habit at a time, and follow these steps:

1. Positive changes. If you’re trying to change a negative habit (quit smoking), replace it with a positive habit (running for stress relief, for example).

To read the entire article from  Leo Babauta through Pick the Brain.com
http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/reach-your-goals-through-daily-habits/

Inspirational Quotes@Inspire_Us from Twitter:
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -Aristotle