Why breaking your Own Rules is Risky

We all have rules. The level of obedience to the rules we’ve set varies from person to person. No matter how undisciplined we might get, there are still some rules we might not break — Nobody is entirely out of control.

We abide by rules based on the foreseen costs or benefits from it. Abiding by rules are all based on understanding. If we understand the dangers or benefits, we would decide if the rule is worth keeping.

Children know it’s terrible to steal because their parents told them that it’s terrible. So, they carry on with that mentality until they get older. When they get older, and they are logical enough, they can now decide if the benefits of stealing outweigh the costs. If it does, they will steal, but if it doesn’t, they will stay away from it.

It’s like that, for all things. We look at the costs and benefits of everything before acting.

Take your alarm clock, for example. An alarm is a rule you set for yourself. And because it’s your rule, you’re free to use the snooze button to hold off waking up. You keep doing it until you either wake up, or you get fed up and switch the alarm off and continue sleeping.

That’s how our goals are too. We plan that we would be done with a project by a specific date, and our mind keeps reminding us about the goal. We snooze the first time, with an excuse, we do it the next time again, until we finally stop thinking about it, and continue with what we were doing that kept us from completing the projects.

We are all wired by habits, and what we do continuously, sticks. It’s why when we keep pressing the snooze button, the sleep becomes better, and it becomes harder just to turn off the alarm and wake up.

We keep snoozing the alarm for days, and while we think we are getting some rest, we are just telling our minds that it is okay to keep sleeping all the while keeping us away from what we are supposed to achieve for the day.

It’s a habit that strengthens the power of sleep.

Take writing, for example. If I don’t write for the whole week, my mind would think it’s okay not to write. And as time passes, it becomes less and less of a big deal. Whether we like it or not, our body does what we tell and show our minds.

You don’t commit to your goals if you don’t understand why you’re in it. Borrowing the idea from the little children example, I used earlier on how Children don’t see why doing something is wrong until they grow older and understand why.

Everybody learns from their personal experience and the experience of others.

A child would not understand that playing with fire is terrible until she gets burnt or sees how someone got affected by the fire.

Back to you, You wouldn’t know that not waking up when your alarm goes off is bad until you lose your job or a contract because you overslept. Or you witnessed someone losing his job because of the same thing. You now get to understand why you should obey your alarm’s instructions to wake up.

When we break our rules, we give ourselves all sorts of excuses to make us go ahead and feel okay with ourselves. You hear things like: “It’s just a one-time thing, or I will do better tomorrow, or it wouldn’t affect anything, etc.

But doesn’t a leak in a bucket, drain the water?

For every excuse and delay, you lose a drop of Self-efficacy. The more it reduces, the harder it would be to complete the task you’ve set for yourself.

Your success depends on your self-efficacy, and you feed it by achieving the goals you have set. It’s nice to set goals, but you have to be strategic.

The first thing that would help your goal setting and self-efficacy is breaking your goals into smaller pieces.

You need to understand that dreaming big isn’t the same thing as calculated dreams. You would see people wake up one day and say they want to write a 10,000-word article every day and make $100,000 in their first month of writing.

You cannot compare that with a person who has a laid down plan to write a 1000-word article every day and make $10 a day for the next 4 months. Although people would ignorantly call him unambitious and mediocre, that doesn’t matter because, as he achieves his small goals every day, his self-image would improve and he would gain momentum compared to the next person. Even if he doesn’t achieve his goals in that time frame, he will come close.

The other guy, for example, would likely move on to another thing after a couple of days for some reason — and he would be okay with moving on because he doesn’t understand quitting is actually doing him more harm.

It just shows you the power of little consistent efforts. The other guy thought he achieve that much in little time but he was wrong. Because success like habits builds up little by little.

The whole point of this article is for you to be careful about the tiny rules you break because when they pile up, it would lead to something else