5 Ways to Create Rituals From Habits

Mindfully transform habits into rituals like great creators before you.

All of us have habits in our daily routine. Maybe its checking our email before starting work or making coffee before talking to anyone or calling our parents during lunch.

Most of our habits develop without us knowing it. We start doing something one day and over time the action is so engrained we don’t even think about it any more.

Habits formed by happenstance are just that: habits. When we mindfully choose our habits and repeat them to serve an end goal, they become rituals. Rituals are the foundation upon which great work is completed.

The Rituals of Great Minds

Great artists throughout history have developed and followed rituals; many that seem ludicrous and even destructive to the casual observer.

• Benjamin Franklin wrote naked for an hour every morning to “refresh” his mind in the cold air.
• Beethoven rose at dawn and counted out exactly 60 coffee beans  to make his perfect morning brew before sitting at his desk and working until 2 p.m.
• Painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec worked best at night setting up his easel in brothels around Paris.

Mason Currey’s book, Daily Rituals, shares the rituals of 161 artists from Picasso to Louis Armstrong to Woody Allen. While the rituals include everything from long walks (Kierkegaard) to secret note writing (Jane Austen), all of the artists have one thing in common: they all had a ritual.

Why Rituals?

In our lives and businesses we have an idea of what we want to accomplish. We might even codify those ideas into goals. How do we reach these goals? More importantly, how do we create amazing work throughout our lives?

The answer is not waiting for inspiration to come. (When are you actually going to be inspired to finish that report or import your spreadsheet of email addresses?) As V.S. Pritchett notes:

Sooner or later the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

I disagree with Pritchett that you have to work every minute of every day. In fact as Joshua Fileds Millburn notes in his minimalist memoir Everything That Remains, taking time to enjoy the moment and avoiding the trap of planning every minute of every day allows space for you to actually think and let the mind wander.

Combining work and solitude into a ritual is the goal. As Currey notes: “A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods.”

5 Ways to Create a Ritual

Everyone has habits, so we might as well make those habits positive. You can shape your habits to help you and then continue those habits with purpose. With purpose, these habits will become your ritual.

There are five simple steps you can take to create a ritual. 

1. Prepare Your Environment

If you set your running shoes out before you go to bed, you’re more likely to run in the morning. If you set Facebook as the first page you see when you open your computer, you’re more likely to spend time on Facebook.

Creating environmental change has a dramatic impact on what we do. Great artists, business leaders and entrepreneurs set themselves up for success by preparing what they want to accomplish before the time to actually do it.

If this means shutting off your Wi-Fi until you write a chapter in your book, do it (Freedom is a great program that can help). If this means opening Excel and finishing your tedious spreadsheet calculations for work before checking your email, do it.

Set yourself up for success and make the environmental preparation a part of your daily ritual.

2. Find Your Productive Window

The artists in Daily Rituals knew when they were most productive, and they protected that window of time.

If you are a morning person, get up and make your ritual centered around that time. Are you a night person like Toulouce-Lautrec? Hide away in your office, study or a bar to create during your peak hours. As Stephen King notes in his book On Writing, write the same time every day and the muse will find you.

3. Do the Hard Stuff First

Normally we push off the annoying work until the end of the day, which becomes the end of the week, which becomes the end of never. As Julien Smith notes if you work on the hardest task first:

you’ll discover that your day will get easier, and the rewards will get better as time goes on. So the first thing is hard, but next is easier, and then easier still, and so on until you have the most fun doing the easiest things on your task list

Plus, we know that the easiest thing on our list will get done anyway so leave that for later.

4. Choose Only 5 Things You Want to Do

Think of these as your longer term vision of where you want to be. You can build tiny steps in your daily ritual that will help you get to where you want to be going.

As Julien reminds us, these activities don’t have to be world-changing actions, but if you have a goal to learn a language, just spend 10 minutes working on it. If you want to live a mindful life, try three minutes of sitting. If you want to spend more time outside, walk your dog around the block each morning.

Choose five simple activities you want to do and spend the minimum amount of time necessary to start getting them done.

5. Focus on Completion, Not Perfection

Spending time every day pursuing your craft doesn’t mean that you will end up with something you are proud of. That’s not the point of a ritual.

The point of a ritual is to continually pursue your end goal. It will be ugly, painful and maybe even fruitless at first. However, if you are able to sit down and do it, the result will come.

Joshua Fields Millburn notes that the best advice he ever got on how to be a good writer was to sit in the chair.

Figure out what your “chair” is and go sit in it every day. Make it a part of your ritual until you it’s impossible not to do it.

Use Your Ritual To Create a Legacy

Creating a ritual is the most important step you can take to succeed at business, create amazing art or become the person you always wanted to be.

You already have habits. All you need to do is transform these habits into positive rituals. These rituals help you to create on a regular basis and “frees our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action” as physchologist William James argued.

The sum of all the tiny steps you take through your ritual creates an impressive body of work, a legacy you can be proud of.

There were lots of great links today (the books are affiliate links to Amazon) so I just wanted to make sure you had a list of them. I can highly recommend them all:

• Daily Rituals by Mason Currey
• “How to Change Your Life” by Julien Smith
• Everything That Remains by Joshua Fields Millburn
• On Writing by Stephen King
• Freedom productivity software