I will be 40 next year. FORTY. There is nothing like a ripe middle-aged birthday to create a sense of urgency. 

What have I achieved? What will I achieve? How long will I take to get there? 

It dawned on me that the skills, knowledge, habits, practices that I acquire in the first 40 years of my life will and should springboard me to success in the next 40 years of my life. 

I want to be a full time investor, trader, stay-at-home mum, with a profitable passive income business model that I can build over and over again.

Progress is a must. 

I want to look back on this very day, 10 November 2024, exactly 365 days later in 2025 and know that I did everything I could to grow my persona – The Wealthy Mum

I took some time to crystallize the persona I resonate with. 

The Wealthy Mum makes wealth, holds wealth, grows wealth. She prioritizes herself and takes good care of her needs and wants. Health is at the top of her list so she eats well and exercises regularly. She gives her best at work but never at the expense of herself, her marriage or her family. She knows the value of time and uses it to advance her goals. She sees into the future and can clearly see the goals set for herself. She makes strategic plans to achieve the outcomes she desires but is not afraid of working around and overcoming setbacks. She gives the best to her children to help them reach their potential. 

So I asked myself 4 important questions. Well 5 actually. 

1. What do I do each quarter?
2. What do I do each month? 
3. What do I do each week? 
4. What do I do each day? 

And the fifth one? 

How do I do all that? How can I do what I need to do, or want to do? 

It dawned on me that success is built on the foundation of good habits. 

So how do we build good lasting habits? The pattern of starting something new only for the excitement and motivation to fizzle out is too familiar. We fall off the bandwagon and getting back on feels difficult. Before we know it, we’ve fallen back into our old practices and patterns. 

The ability to start a new habit, sustain it and grow it into a meaningful practice that changes your life, and to do it fast, is powerful. If I could do this,I could learn almost any skill I choose, master any new process or take on any challenge that comes my way. 

What then is the tiniest building block? 

A tiny habit 

All I need is a small, 1% change to drastically alter the course of my life. Many 1% changes have the power to improve my life drastically in a year. 

Let’s list a few things that have made it to almost every new year’s resolution list.

• Eat healthy wholesome foods 
• Stay hydrated 
• Sleep regularly
• Avoid social media and doom scrolling 
• Meditate and journal 
• Exercise regularly 
• Lose weight 
• Manage time
• Start a business
• Read regularly 
• Spend time with my family

Are any of these on your list too? They definitely have been on mine. 

I read Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg and noted down these 4 key areas to effective habit building which I want to share with you. I hope you will take away something which shapes your own beliefs on instilling new habits and feel empowered to take action. 

To start new habits, we need to consider the following: 

1. Don’t depend on your motivation or willpower 
2. Start within your current ability
3. Start smaller than small
4. Design habits to take place after things that already happen in our lives (aka prompts). 

1 Don’t depend on motivation or willpower

Motivation is a strong desire that propels you to take action to achieve a goal. Our minds are designed to use motivation to compel us to complete a mammoth task – like running into a fire to save a life. 

It doesn’t last and cannot keep us consistent. Motivation was not designed to help us complete a task over and over again. Depending on motivation to sustain a habit over weeks, months, years will definitely backfire. 

Why fight against your brain? 

Instead of depending on willpower, start where you are and with very small habits.

2 Start where you are at

Ability matters. For longer lasting success, underestimate what you can do. 

If you have never cooked, planning to cook every single one of your meals next month is a very demanding ask. Instead, plan to prepare one meal a day. Choose simpler meals with fewer ingredients and simple cooking steps. 

I’ve always wanted to make my own meal kits and freeze my own seasoned meats for the convenience of cooking when I don’t feel like it. I’m a pretty good cook and doing it once or twice was easy enough but somehow I could not work it into a routine. Having enough meat, enough packaging material and different types of seasoning was more difficult than I thought. 

Deep down, my mindset wasn’t ready because I was taught that everything always should be freshly prepared. 

I had to start where my beliefs were at. Starting small, I simply made extra portions of what I was making. 

I made 2 servings of tuna mayo. One for our breakfast, one for Monday’s breakfast. 

I cooked twice the amount of fish stock I needed. One for the current meal and another for freezing.

I started washing and preparing our fruits and vegetables in bulk. I would wash and chop up spring onions in different shapes for storage for the week. 

I tried new things and discovered what I liked and what I didn’t. 

My success: 

My vegetables like salad greens, spring onion, white onions last longer than I expected. I discovered easy ways to clean and store different vegetables and fruits. Most of all, I truly enjoyed how much less time I spent in the kitchen! 

With a more positive mindset towards meal prepping, I started looking forward to have extra portions and meal prepping. 

I feel more ready to preparing ingredients and freezing meals ahead of time.

3 Start small, very small. 

This is such elegant advice. In my excitement to start anything, I bite off more than I can chew. I mean.. Go big or go home right? 

Wrong. 

Go big.. And you end up falling off the bandwagon. 

So this time start with the smallest simplest action of anything you want to start. 

One of my long term goals to improve my health is to eat more whole nutrient-dense foods (vegetables, fruits, whole grains)  and less ultra processed foods (chips, cookies, ice cream). 

This goal is vague, complex and very challenging to keep up to. Wired to keep us safe, our brain finds ways to avoid anything difficult and new. Once the motivation wears off, usually in a few weeks, it becomes a huge task. 

I simplified my long term goal of eating healthily into a tiny simple action. 

I will buy one packet of salad greens every week during my grocery run. 

I unpack it and store it in a crisper for vegetables to keep them fresh for the rest of the week.

With freshly washed salad greens, it was so easy to incorporate fiber into my meals, effectively reducing my overall calorie intake. 

As of today, I have been successful for 6 weeks! I almost always have salad greens on hand, ready for a salad or sandwich. 

4 Design habits to take place after things that already happen in our lives (aka prompts). 

Biologically, we automatically do things based on what we see, hear, smell, feel and taste around us. The best analogy I can think of is driving a car – how we drive depends a lot on muscle memory. 

To hack this biological response, we can plan for new habits to take place based on what already goes on in our lives. Together with easy, small actions, this makes it so easy for us to be successful over and over again, effectively forming a habit. 

Taking the 4 ideas into consideration, I started incorporating new small habits into my daily life. The end goal is to start small and go faster instead of going big and failing over and over again. 

I started about 6 weeks ago and I am proud of the success I’ve made. 

My thought process for building tiny habits to propel me to success

	Goals	Small habit	Even smaller habit
1	Eat healthy wholesome foods	Keep stash of healthy snack options (yoghurt, dark chocolate, nuts, cherry tomatoes in office and home)	Buy salad greens during grocery run
2	Stay hydrated	Drink water every time I sit down at my desk	Fill my bottle each morning when I wake up
3	Sleep and wake at regular timing	Stop social media scrolling at night	Set alarm to wake at 5.30am each day no matter weekday or weekend
4	Avoid social media and doom scrolling	Turn off all social media notifications	Leave earbuds in the study room
5	Connect with my future self.	Meditate and journal regularly	Think ahead How do I want to feel after xyz activity? What does success look like?
6	Exercise regularly	Go to the gym on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday	Change into gym clothes everyday after work
7	Delegate my time effectively	Finish work at 4.30pm daily	Write down top 3 tasks for the day
8	Build a blog	Write blog article regularly	Write with a cup of tea every Thursday night
9	Read regularly	Focus on learning instead of reading	Listen to blinkist on the treadmill
10	Spend time with my children	Spend 1 hour with them daily	Sit with them in the living room after dinner each day

Instead of slowly and surely progressing towards the person I want to be, I am making leaps and bounds. There is a saying that money loves speed. By extrapolation, I success loves speed too. 

Don’t wait around for the new year to start your new resolutions. Learn the skill of building habits and soon you can turn into the person you’ve always wanted to be.

You’ve got this.