Two Minutes Is All It Takes
You can completely change the trajectory of your life in less than two minutes.
Find out how, right here.
Don’t you just love clickbait titles on social media?
Yeah, me either.
This morning I fell for two on YouTube as I was waking up with my first cup of coffee:
The End of an Era, Rick Beato. What the heck is that about? Oh, it’s his 10th anniversary since starting his YouTube channel. I watched about half of it and then, disgusted, shut it off.
Get Everything Done Before 11am, Dan Martell. It was about the same old productivity junk and how he has built a “9-figure” business empire, as he puts it.
Look, sometimes I like hearing what these two guys have to say, And I did get one good idea from Martell’s video.
but thinking back on it, I was hesitant to press play on both videos. Why? Because I suspected they would waste my time. Today was just one more example of that happening.
This got me thinking about habit breaking and habit formation.
And yes, you can change your life in less than two minutes.
Let me tell you one of my favorite stories about my maternal grandfather to illustrate.
Evidently, he was a smoker back in the day, probably up until the 1950s, as best I can gather.
I guess everyone smoked cigarettes back then, but I never thought of him as a smoker. I was lucky to come of age when smoking was finally being exposed as a terrible thing to do. Oh sure, I had some cigarettes, and come to think of it, many of my friends—perhaps half of them—ended up developing the habit. But I never quite succumbed to the “I have to go buy a pack of cigarettes” stage.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I did buy a pack once or twice. But fewer than five times, that much I know.
Thank goodness.
Anyway, my grandfather kicked the habit along the way.
How did he do it?
It was so simple it’s almost stupid.
He started scarfing down goofballs.
Back then, that term meant drugs. Particularly barbiturates and tranquilizers.
But his goofballs were little round pink Brach’s candies.
I had to look up the name of them, and evidently they don’t make them anymore.
They were called Brach’s Wintergreen Lozenges. (You can still get an equivalent of them in Canada, the internet tells me.)
He threw away his cigarettes—or at least never bought them again, as far as we know—and anytime he had a craving for a smoke, he would grab one of these little candies instead.
That became the substitute.
He kept them up high in a bowl on top of a china cabinet. Sort of out of sight, out of mind, but there if you wanted or needed one to fight the urge.
As kids staying with my grandparents during the summers, my brother and I found his stash and used to sneak a few goofballs ourselves. Or ask if we could have one.
According to my mom, when her friends came over to visit, he loved offering them a goofball, much to her horror.
Her friends thought he was hilarious.
And he was.
You see, he lived to a ripe old age, particularly for that era. He was over 82 when he died and remained remarkably healthy, at least by 20th-century standards, right up until the end.
Somewhere along the way, he had also taken up a regular four-mile round-trip morning walk into the downtown of the small city where he lived.
That probably contributed to his health and longevity.
It was also one of my favorite things to do with him.
At the time, the walk followed a boulevard lined with a huge canopy of trees that provided wonderful shade. It was beautiful, and perhaps part of the reason I love trees so much today.
In fact, his walk on the morning he died was one of the last things he did that day.
Morbid?
Maybe.
But I like it.
He did something good for himself, something he enjoyed, and then it was over.
Anyway, this morning it dawned on me.
I need a goofball.
I need something to keep me from reaching for my phone and pressing play on another clickbait video.
I’ll be thinking about it today and will report back tomorrow on what I come up with.
What about you?
Do you have a habit you know is no good for you?
What kind of goofball could you use to help yourself get out of the rut?