Anybody can make the right decision once or twice — pick the salad instead of the french fries, go to the gym instead of scrolling social media or save money instead of going out for the weekend. But what separates us from maintaining a healthy diet, our physical fitness or financial stability? Consistency.

Doing something a single time does not provide the benefit of having done the thing a thousand times. Take finances for example. Say you one day decide not to get dessert with dinner, or you skip the appetizer, or both. That saves you anywhere from $8 to $17, give or take. Do that a single time and we can buy ourselves a new pair of underwear or maybe a T-shirt. Not too exciting, is it? But what if we did that every time we went out to eat? What if we instead took advantage of compounding? Do that over the course of a decade and we are saving $3,840. And that's just dinner. What if we cut the cost of lunch in half or stopped buying so many clothing items? What would happen to our financial health if we made consistently great financial decisions? The answer is obvious; we would be wealthy.

So what keeps us from making the right choice? It's hard. We want the cute bag or the chocolate cake or to relax and watch TV instead of working out, but only in the short term. We would be most pleased with ourselves in the long term if we made the right choice today and stepped into the gym, made great choices financially so we could enjoy our financial freedom later, and our body would thank us, even a couple hours later, if we chose the salad over the fries.

So how can we start to make the right choices? Make them easy to make. Surprisingly, the most successful people are not the ones with the most will to resist temptation. They simply change their environment to encourage the right decisions. Think. Can you imagine a home of a successful person? Is it clean or messy? Do they serve pizza or a well-balanced meal? What's on their counter — healthy snack items like fruit or bags of potato chips? All these questions serve to ask if they make the right choice easy on themselves.   

When we make the wrong decision, it's because the temptation is easier for us than the hesitation to make the right decision. If we put the chips away and put fruit on the table, we are more likely to snack on the good stuff. The same is true of the financial situation – if we don't want to spend money, then we should not go shopping as often. And for working out, we can make it part of the routine we already have. For example, we can decide that immediately after work we will go to the gym, or maybe immediately before, and prepare ourselves in a way that makes it easy to accomplish this aim by setting out clothes for ourselves, or bringing a gym bag to and from work.

Essentially, two techniques for making habits more "sticky" are the following:

  1. Associate new habits with ones that you already make.
  2. Make good habits the easy choice.
  3. Remember that success comes from consistent focused effort, not a single evening of hard work. It's a marathon, not a sprint, and therefore it is easier to gradually change your self image than to completely change it overnight.