The 3 Most Essential Habits for Living Well

I’ve written dozens of posts on habits, and consider good habits to be one of the core life skills that everyone should know.

But for a blog that espouses minimalism, I’ve certainly asked my readers to consider many habits over the years.

It’s easy to get carried away with habits. I know I have.

In rebound seasons, where I’m trying hard to make up for “lost time” and regret, I’ve made insane habit tracking systems for myself that ultimately ended in failure.

You simply can’t make everything a priority.

One of the life questions I keep coming back to is: what really matters?

What are the few things that actually make a difference?

While every good habit is a net benefit to your life, some habits are what I might call “keystone habits”.

If you get these habits right, everything else in your life feels like it’s clicking back into place.

Given that, why bother with a long list of habits, just focus on those few force multipliers that improve your life along so many dimensions.

You’ll be more likely to stick with this simple set of habits, and get all the same benefits.

After sitting down to really think about it, I’ve come up with my list of essential habits.

Yours might be a little different. In fact, it really should be.

But I hope this exercise gets you thinking about where you might be wasting motion, and which habits ultimately matter.

My 3 essential habits:

Habit #1: Move your body every day.

Somehow in my busyness, or maybe it was laziness, I forgot about the life sustaining power of exercise.

Maybe it was the fact that I kept up my daily walking habit that convinced me I was still ok.

But nothing in the world beats exercise that makes you sweat.

If you’re not doing this on a daily basis, what in the world are you waiting for?

There’s nothing better.

You won’t feel that way for the first 3-4 weeks, but soon enough you will. Trust me on this one.

Habit #2: Do not avoid hard work.

90% of my negative emotions in life are the result of avoiding things I know I should be doing.

For a long time, I just said I had an aversion to boredom.

But really, I had an aversion to doing hard work. And there’s already a word for that: laziness.

I’m not sure there’s an easy path to fixing this problem, if I’m describing you. 

For me, I just had to become disgusted by living like that and want nothing to do with it anymore.

I’m still building up my endurance, but now I’ve at least come to see hard work as a desirable part of my life that allows me to do and participate in the interesting life I want to live.

Without hard work, all of those doors are closed to you.

Habit #3: Remember your death bed.

My first two habits could be construed as having to do with getting the most out of your own life, though I honestly mean them to be more than that.

This last habit makes explicit my true goal, which is to connect my life to something bigger than myself.

For me, this means investing in relationships and my faith.

Many people say these areas are important to them, but if you look at how they spend their time, money, or mental energy you’d find they have other higher priorities.

It’s easy to think you’ll have time to sort out these areas of your life later, once you build a solid foundation of success or happiness.

But that’s a trap. Why wait on the very things that give life their purpose to you?

By thinking about the fact that I’ll die someday, this somehow reorients my thinking away from selfish pursuits and towards those that connect me to others.

Because at the end of my life, I think those are the only things I’ll really care about.