Do you feel stuck? Have you set goals and failed repeatedly? Do you feel like goal setting doesn’t work? It doesn’t have to be this way. You can break free and make 2021 one of the greatest years of your life! The key to your breakthrough is learning how to create lasting habits. Yes, habits can be the fuel for your rocket. Speaking more broadly of retirement, habits will be an integral part of succeeding in all four phases of retirement: the prepare-to-go, go-go, slow-go, and no-go years. It’s going to be a great year!
HABITS VS GOALS
As you step into 2021, should you work on goals or habits? In my opinion, it isn’t choosing one or the other, but rather how they work together. For me, habits have allowed me to achieve my goals. For example, I used to weigh about 225 pounds. I used habits to reduce my weight to below 190 pounds, my high school weight, and have kept it off for almost a decade. When I cheat and gain some weight I know exactly the habits to implement to get me back into the weight range range I’m comfortable with.  

For me, habits have helped me achieve goals with my family, my spiritual life, and my career. Before I mastered many of the principles of habits, I would have aspirations for change in my life; I would even write them down but would often fail. I struggled with how to keep them in front of me and maintain momentum. It’s completely different now.

It can be the same for you. The ability to have a brighter vision for your life and then make SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals from that vision is only the first step in the process. The next is to develop the habits and system to achieve the goal.

That being said, habits don’t have to be tied to a specific SMART goal. You could simply want to be healthier or lose weight so you put a new habit in place. No matter the future-self you envision, learning how to create lasting habits can be the key. One of the key reasons is that it gets you off the willpower treadmill.
WILLPOWER VS HABITS
According to research, willpower is like a muscle, that can become depleted and wear down the more you use it. It’s like a muscle that has been lifting weights. Eventually, performance declines and recovery is needed to rebuild the muscle.

Ironically, as we exhibit self-control, our ability to make choices becomes fatigued. Our willpower decreases over the course of a day, which means that we can often undermine our best intentions because we default to the level of the current programming of our mind and body. The reason we set our vision or goal in the first place was because we didn’t like the results we were getting in our life and the reason we are often stuck getting the results we are is the current software of our mind and body. It can really be a vicious cycle.

The way we break free from relying on willpower is to form habits that become automatic. Take for example, brushing your teeth. You probably don’t have to put that in your schedule. It just happens. Once you start brushing your teeth, you don’t have to think about how to brush your teeth either. Your mind can even wander off but you still brush your teeth. 
THE MIND AND BODY WANT TO BE EFFICIENT AND CONSERVE ENERGY
The brain and body are built to optimize energy and run efficiently. You don’t have to think about your heart beating, digesting your food, or what to do when you’re sleeping. The body has systems and programming that automatically do these things. Your mind works similarly but is also more complex, as you’ve probably noticed. Our subconscious mind, or what I like to call the running mind, are those thoughts that occur automatically, for example daydreaming. Another example is driving to work on a familiar route. Often you can just arrive, while your running mind took over and very little mental exertion was needed.