Automation is considered to be one of the most beneficial inventions and technological advancements in the 20th century.
It was because of the creation of machines and later software systems that humans were able to eliminate the toil and unpleasant work, so instead the brain power and resources could be focused on more important tasks, the more pleasant and joyful ones; Tasks that define us as humans. The art, painting, music, and literature that computers and machines don’t have a competitive advantage in them over humans. Allocating all the unleashed resources from hard labor and physical tasks to spending time on thinking, creating, and generating new ideas or even new art (From andy kind and form) was what resulted in the flourishing of the humanistic and creative part of human beings.
Our leisure time expanded as a result of outsourcing repetitive tasks and having more time to spend on whatever we wanted to spend.
But this ability, meaning outsourcing the simple tasks and spending the least amount of energy and resources on them, was at first one of the functions of our brain that nature inherited in our cognitive system. Think about the brain as a manager who has to allocate attention, time, and energy to different activities. Our consciousness is a small part of what we are aware of ourselves, our body, and this world, and our existence in general. Underlying consciousness is the subconscious or the part of our mind that we are not aware of. It is the part that makes many decisions and while we don’t know why. Simple tasks like eating food or breathing are handled very well without any need for us to allocate our attention to such tasks as simple as breathing or walking.
You do it and execute it without thinking about it. This is called habits and every activity can be so smoothly done and performed that requires the least amount of attention and effort. Eating habits, sleeping habits, exercising habits, reading or smoking habits are all examples of good and bad habits that we do every day without deeply thinking about them.
Of course, in the short run, none of these activities can be beneficial or harmful. If you read only one page today and leave it for the next year nothing will change in the course of your life during that year. If you continue reading for one year, after a while you can see the results and difference in the way you look at the world and the development of your mindset and opinion system.
In other words, and the language of mathematics, your life and destiny, in the long run, is the integration of all negligible and small things you do in the present, and if not being careful with them, you might end up with so many wasted opportunities and the time that could have been used every day to build something great and valuable in future.
Your habits can be your competitive advantage in the long run, while thinking about the smallest and most simple things that you do in your day-to-day life can accumulate and have aggregate effects in the course of your life.
First start with eliminating the bad habits in your life, whether it’s smoking, drinking alcohol, eating too much processed and sugar-added food watching TV wasting time on social media, while you eliminate the behaviors that in the long run don’t benefit you or even harm your body in general. Using that time for habits that actually can benefit you is going to change your destiny. It is hard at the beginning to establish a good habit, after all, if reading books was as easy as watching TV, everyone would have already had that habit in their daily routines. But it takes time to make your brain addicted to good habits like reading a book or playing an instrument.
Bad habits also never get erased from your brain’s neuron system, rather they are replaced by the good ones and the interesting fact about it is that your brain can’t distinguish between good and bad habits. In other words, it is only us that label something as good and something else as a bad habit based on the harm and benefit that they provide us in the long run after executing them so many times.
After establishing one or two habits that can benefit you in the long run, you can think about a portfolio of good habits. A basket that can lead you to success in the long run and by doing them, you are one step closer to your goals every day.
When one of two of them becomes automatic (Like reading, in my case) then you can focus on adding more.
The smarter strategy is to have all or most of your habits in this portfolio aligned in a way that they have a synergetic effect. This means the combination of them creates something greater than their separate parts. In other words, 2+2 > 4.
I like exercise for instance for the same reason. I like to have it near other habits that I have, like reading books or writing on this blog. Some research shows having physical activity in addition to increasing the general health of the body can increase the cognitive performance memory and other functions of your brain.
Habits are double-edged swords, they can either harm you or serve you in the long run. So always pick them carefully and be aware of which one you add to your life and which one you decide to remove.