I think I’ve subconsciously thought this before but I came across this notion a few months ago and it resonated with me. Change is an incredibly hard thing to enact, often taking huge amounts of effort to do. This thought isn’t going to drastically make it easier, but I’m sure anyone who has tried to make a change knows that if you environment is working against you, behavior change becomes much harder. An example of this is if you wanted to stop eating processed sweets, but didn’t clean out your cupboard of chocolates, you’re going to have a much harder time avoiding them.
So if you wanted to spend less time on your phone, it seems silly to upgrade to the latest model. However, if you want to spend more time running, it seems like a good idea to spend money on running clothes, shoes etc. This may seem very obvious, but if we change our purchasing habits, I believe it can really shape our lives.
This isn’t to say that as soon as you buy a pair of running shoes you’re going to consistently run 3x per week, but it definitely reduces the activation energy for doing that activity.
Another example of this I’ve noticed in my life is, I bought a kindle about 1 year ago to enable me to read more of the books I wanted to read and was interested in. Previously what I had done to get books was go to the local primary school fete book store and buy 20 books, and repeat this every year. This limited me in the scope of books I would read to a lot of crime fiction and some classics, which wasn’t bad I just wanted something different. The kindle allowed me to get whatever book I wanted much easier and cheaper than going to a book store and buying one. I already had a habit of reading every night, but I now consume a much more varied literary diet which has been great. All because I lowered the activation energy to doing so by my spending choices.
This is a very simple but very powerful tool to use to help you enact the changes you want. So next time you’re spending money on something, think, do I really want to spend more time in this area?
Harrison Hansford 