HABITS

Personal Systems · Habits

How identifying bad habits led me to the BEST habits

For a long time, I had some really shitty habits.
I drank too much.
I smoked cigarettes.
And neither happened occasionally.
They became part of my daily routine.
That's the scary thing about habits.
They don't usually announce themselves.

Nobody wakes up one morning and says:

I think I'll develop a habit today that could eventually control a significant portion of my life.

You just do it.

Looking back, understanding that process may have been one of the most important things that ever happened to me.

Because eventually I realized something:

If my brain was capable of becoming incredibly good at bad habits, why couldn't I use the exact same mechanism to build incredibly good ones?

That question changed my life.

2007–2015: I Left Opportunities on the Table

But drinking and having fun too often took priority over building the business.

That’s difficult to admit because it’s easy to rewrite your own history.

You can blame timing.
The economy.
Customers.
Employees.
Partners.
Competition.
Bad luck.
There are always explanations available.
But eventually I had to look at myself.

I blew opportunities.

Not every opportunity.
Not every day.
I still worked.
I still built businesses.
I still accomplished things.
But I know what I was capable of.
And I know I wasn't consistently giving it everything I had.
Too many nights revolved around drinking.
Then you wake up the next morning operating at 60 or 70 percent.
Maybe you still work.
Maybe nobody else even notices.

But you know.

Then you do it again.
And again.
And that's where the real damage happens.
Not necessarily in one catastrophic event.
It's the accumulation.
A morning here.
An opportunity there.
A conversation you weren't prepared for.
An idea you didn't execute.
A project you didn't finish.

A day when you were physically present but mentally operating below your potential.

Multiply that across years.

That's expensive.

The Drinking Had to Stop

Eventually I started recognizing where this was going.

This wasn’t simply:

I drink more than I probably should.

I could see the habit becoming something much more serious if I didn’t change it.

So I changed it.

July 1, 2015.

That’s when I stopped drinking.

I didn’t know exactly what the next ten years were going to look like.

I just knew I didn’t want the next ten to look like the previous eight.

Then I Looked at Cigarettes

Once I stopped drinking, another bad habit became impossible to ignore.

It was the loop.

My brain had learned exactly what to do.
Certain situation.
Certain feeling.
Certain time.
Certain environment.
Cigarette.
The behavior had become efficient.
That's what habits do.
Good or bad, your brain doesn't particularly care.
It learns the pattern.

So on December 17, 2015, I stopped smoking cigarettes too.

Within about six months, I had removed two of the worst habits from my life.

But something much more important was beginning.

I was learning that habits could be deliberately redesigned.

I Needed Something to Replace Them

I don't think simply removing behavior is enough.
You create a vacuum.
Something is going to fill it.
So I started exercising.
Walking.
Running.
Working out.
Moving.
Then doing it again tomorrow.
And the next day.
And the next.

Eventually exercise stopped being something I was trying to make myself do.

It became something I did.
That's a huge distinction.
There have been different workouts.
Different routines.
Different places.
Different goals.
Different phases of my life.
But the underlying habit has remained.

Move.

Exercise.

Do something physical.

I’ve been doing that ever since.

And somewhere along the way I realized:

I had taken the machinery that helped create my worst habits and started using it to create my best ones.

Bad Habits Taught Me How Powerful Habits Are

That's the irony.
Drinking taught me about consistency.
Smoking taught me about triggers.
Quitting taught me about identity.
Exercise taught me about compounding.
Business taught me about systems.

Put all of those together and I started looking at human behavior differently.

People think discipline means constantly forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do.

I don’t think that’s the ultimate goal.

The goal is to build the behavior deeply enough that not doing it feels strange.

That’s where I eventually got with exercise.

It wasn’t:

Should I exercise today?

It became:

When am I exercising today?

Then I Started Thinking About the Opportunities I Lost

Because I knew something very clearly:

I didn't want to make the same mistake twice.

I didn’t want to reach another point in my life and think:

You had the opportunity.
You had the tools.
You had the experience.
You knew what you were capable of.
And you still didn't give it everything.
Fuck that.
Once was enough.

Then AI Showed Up

This is where the story gets interesting to me.

Because we’re living through something I’ve never experienced before.

For the first time in my life, I have access to a system that can think alongside me.

Not think for me.

That's an important distinction.
Alongside me.
I can dump ideas into it.
Challenge ideas.
Organize thoughts.
Analyze decisions.
Track patterns.
Build systems.
Study businesses.
Research markets.
Create.
Write.
Question assumptions.
Measure progress.
Remember what worked.
Look at what didn't.
And then come back tomorrow and continue.
That's completely different from any tool I've had before.

And immediately I started thinking about it through the lens of habits.

What Happens If I Give AI the Same Consistency I Gave Exercise?

That’s the experiment I’m running now.

I’ve already proven to myself that I can commit to something for years.

I did it with drinking in the wrong direction.
I did it with cigarettes in the wrong direction.
Then I reversed it.
I did it with exercise.
I did it with running.
I did it with movement.

So what happens if I take that same ability to create a habit and attach it to AI-assisted thinking?

Not occasionally.

Not:

I'll use ChatGPT when I need an answer.

I'm talking about making AI part of the operating system.
Every day.
Ideas.
Business.
Health.
Creativity.
Planning.
Experiments.
Failures.
Questions.
Observations.
Goals.
Results.
Put it into the system.
Then look for patterns.

I Don't Want AI to Make Me Lazy

This is an important distinction.
There is an obvious danger with AI.
You can use it to avoid thinking.
Ask question.
Get answer.
Copy.
Paste.
Done.
That's not particularly interesting to me.
I want the opposite.

I want AI to make me think more.

Challenge me.

Show me the pattern I missed.

Connect something I said six months ago with something I’m doing today.

Tell me when I'm repeating myself.
Tell me when my actions don't match my stated objective.
Help me take 50 scattered ideas and find the three that matter.
Help me measure whether the system is actually working.
That's much more powerful than asking AI to write another email.

I Started Thinking About My Life Like a System

This eventually became what I call my Neuro-Creative System.

The idea is relatively simple.
My brain produces enormous amounts of information.
Ideas.
Observations.
Questions.
Emotions.
Business concepts.
Mistakes.
Patterns.
Most of that historically disappeared.
I'd have an idea while walking.
Think about it.
Maybe remember it.
Maybe not.
I'd learn something about myself.
Then six months later I'd have to learn it again.
That's incredibly inefficient.

So I started asking:

What if I stop allowing all of that information to disappear?

Then use AI to help me see patterns across time that would be almost impossible for me to hold simultaneously in my own head.

Now AI isn’t simply a tool.

It's part of the feedback loop.

The Best Habit May Be Self-Awareness

That's where this has eventually led me.
Exercise is an incredible habit.
Not drinking has been an incredible decision.
Stopping cigarettes was an incredible decision.
But there's another level above individual habits.

Awareness of the habits themselves.

Why am I doing this?
Is it helping?
Is it hurting?
Is this still serving me?
What am I avoiding?
Where am I wasting time?
What's producing results?
What's draining energy?
What should I repeat?
What should I eliminate?

What am I doing today that I will wish I had stopped ten years from now?

That’s the question I wish I had asked myself more often between 2007 and 2015.

So now I’m building systems that force me to ask it.

I Can't Get Those Years Back

I know what it feels like to prioritize having fun over building something that matters to me.

I know what bad habits look like when they’re becoming automatic.

And I know something else now.

Good habits become automatic too.

That’s the opportunity.

I can’t change what I did between 2007 and 2015.

But I can make damn sure I don’t look back at 2026 through 2035 and say the same thing.

And now I have something I’ve never had before:

An intelligent system capable of helping me organize all of it.

This Is My Experiment

I don’t know exactly where AI goes from here.

Nobody does.

But I’m convinced that one of its most powerful applications won’t simply be automating businesses.

It will be helping people understand and improve themselves.

That's what I'm experimenting with.
Take a human being.
Add discipline.
Add habits.
Add exercise.
Add experience.
Add creativity.
Add constant self-observation.

Then connect all of that to an AI system that can organize, question, and analyze what that person is doing.

That's why I'm doing it.

I spent part of my life accidentally training my brain to repeat behaviors that were taking me in the wrong direction.

Then I learned how to deliberately train it in the other direction.

To multiply them.

Because I’ve already learned what happens when habits work against me.

Now I want to see what happens when I build the best habits I possibly can—and give them the best system I’ve ever had to work with.

I’ve wasted enough potential.

I'm interested in maximizing the rest of it.

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