Making little changes that go the distance is how to achieve big results.

If you had to name the best-selling book of the past few years, chances are you might pick EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. And you’d be right that people are still snapping up the erotic potboiler, even though it first came out over a decade ago.

More recently, however, another title has been flying off the shelves. Atomic Habits by James Clear has already sold more than 9 million copies, and I can honestly say it’s changed my life. Yet its underlying message is remarkably simple: small habits make a huge difference.

It was Aristotle who said: “Ninety-five per cent of everything you do is the result of habit.” Habits make us who we are. But according to Clear, we need to flip that on its head. Before we decide which habits to form and which to break, we must first decide who we want to be, he suggests.

Another way of thinking about habits is to think of them like interest on your savings, says Clear. Yes, the magic of compounding works for habits, just like it does for money. There is a simple equation that sums this up: new identity = good habits + time. The “new identity” part of the equation is what kind of person we want to be, and the best foundation for any good habit, says Clear, is coming up with a compelling idea for who that person is.

Former All Black Sir John Kirwan knows a bit about identity. For years, he enjoyed fame as a national hero, before going public about his struggles with depression. He is now celebrated as a champion for mental wellbeing and has co-founded a popular app, Groov, that helps people manage their mental health.

So, how did he manage the transition from rugby player to businessperson to investor to start-up founder? “I made peace with failure,” he says. “It used to hold me back, but now I have a philosophy: if I fail, then I just learnt something.”

Less drastic identity shifts are just as effective. The key is to optimise an aspect of who you already are. It’s also important to focus on that identity, rather than outcomes. For example, the goal is not ‘to read a book’ or ‘to save some money’, it’s to become ‘a reader’ or ‘a saver’.

It’s easy to skip ahead to all the good habits you could form, but it’s far more productive to ask yourself, “Who am I, what do I want and who do I want to be?” says Clear.

Kirwan’s “monkey brain’

When I asked myself this question two years ago, it was due to hitting a wall in my job. I’d done all the obvious things when it came to being good at the job, but I wanted to keep getting better at the same pace. My answer was, “I want to be a consistent high performer over the long term – someone who puts themselves in a position to be the best version of themselves every day.” This told me that I needed to change my identity, or at least tweak it a little.

The cost of not choosing an identity is that you never quite seize who you are. Two years ago, I hadn’t given this much thought. My habits were pretty obvious. I would arrive at work on time, I would sometimes get emotional when things didn’t go my way, and I would often go to bed quite late, getting by on five to seven hours of sleep.

I decided to approach my job like a ­professional athlete approaches their sport. I talked to the highest-performing people I worked with about how they brought out the best in themselves every day. I googled “best habits to form for work”, and I considered the opportunity cost of not doing anything.

For Kirwan, the cost of not taking action reached breaking point. “I’ve got what I call a monkey brain. I call my monkey Bob. So, early in the piece, I didn’t want to go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I wasn’t getting any better. So, I eventually went to one. It was the greatest thing I ever did, because I learnt these tools.”

We’ll get to those tools, also known as habits, in a moment. What is worth underscoring at this point is the power of making a decision. “Whenever I do something, I get great people around me and I’m really open and honest about my strengths and weaknesses,” says Kirwan. “And then I go from there.” Rallying a community of supporters around you solidifies any decision.

For me, the goal was not to get a pay rise, it was to become a consistent high performer. Once you’ve thought long and hard about an identity for yourself – and you do need to think long and hard, because it’s the most important step in the process – the next step is to decide what habits will help you achieve that.

“In the early stages of my wellbeing ­journey, I realised that it’s those little things. I started habit stacking,” says Kirwan, referring to the practice of stacking a new behaviour on top of an existing behaviour. “So, after a shower, I’d go downstairs and have a cup of coffee, but my phone wasn’t invited. I would sit there and enjoy and taste the coffee. I started building a daily mental health plan around those little things. I do those five or six things every single day. It keeps me well to this day.”

The vital few

Every action you take, says Clear, is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. “No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity,” he writes.

“This is one reason meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.”

Start by making a list of at least 10 habits you could form that represent your new identity. There are no wrong answers, and you can draw inspiration from other people’s habits. Next, pick two or three habits on the list that will get you at least 80% of the way towards assuming your new identity.

This is the Pareto principle – also called the 80/20 principle or the law of the vital few – which states that for many outcomes, roughly 80 per cent of consequences come from 20 per cent of causes. It basically means that instead of trying to do everything on your list, concentrate on the 20 per cent of habits that will get you 80 per cent of your new identity. Of course, you won’t know for sure which of the habits on your list will be most effective until you try them, but you have to start somewhere.

One way I use the 80/20 principle to make decisions about which habits to pursue is to look at my list and ask myself, “Which habit scares me the most?” This is usually the habit that I know will make the biggest impact, but it’s typically the habit that will require the biggest shift in identity.

After a false start with meditation, Kirwan implemented a series of small habits to manage his overactive mind. What he has found is that reading, cooking and playing the guitar all helped him put “Bob the monkey” back in his cage.

“Technology has accelerated to a place where it’s very difficult to switch off. We need techniques to make sure we switch off on a daily basis,” he says. “I’m an active relaxer. So, I’ve got to do those things every single day.”

For me, the single habit that has been most effective is getting eight hours’ sleep before each workday. That might not seem like a big deal, but for 10 years, I was a comedy writer and TV producer. Many people who work in the entertainment industry don’t have the luxury of routines that make it easier to have a regular bedtime.

So despite no longer working regularly in that industry, I feared this new habit would be a catastrophic threat to my long-held belief that I was someone who comes alive at night. But I also knew that if I could implement it, it would get me 80 per cent of the way to my new identity. The cost of not taking action was obvious: I would continue to plateau in my job, not make much of an impact, and not get decent pay rises. So I went for it.

Performing on cue

What are the best habits to form? That depends on the identity you choose. If you want to be a healthy eater, then consuming 4000 calories a day would be a bad habit. If you want to be a professional sumo wrestler, however, it would probably be quite good. If you want to be good with money, then a good habit to establish is to set up sinking funds. These are accounts you set up for a specific purchase at some stage in the future, for which you put aside small regular amounts. You calculate the amounts by dividing how much you need by how long you’ve got to save it.

“It still surprises me that people don’t think to use them,” says Ruth Henderson, the host of The Happy Saver podcast. “Most people try to save for many things with one giant pot of money, but the mental math required to keep track of what goes where is too much. Simply having a specific bank account for a specific short-/medium-term expense you know you have coming up gives people immense peace of mind.”

Other life-changing money habits worth forming include investing a portion of your income every time you get paid (on top of KiwiSaver), and giving away a portion of that income every time you get paid, even if it’s just $5.

So, how do we form good habits? According to Clear, there are four stages to every habit: cue, craving, response, and reward. Together, this is called a habit loop. The ‘cue’ kick-starts your brain to begin the behaviour. ‘Craving’ is the motivational force behind everything we want. ‘Response’ is the actual habit you do – this can be a thought or action. ‘Reward’ is the end goal of every habit. And since this is a habit loop, the last stage (reward) becomes associated with the first stage (cue) every time the craving is satisfied.

Let’s say you have decided to form the habit of getting eight hours’ sleep before each workday. The cue could be an evening alarm on your phone that tells you to start getting ready for bed half an hour before you need to fall asleep. The craving is that you want to sleep. The response is that you start your bedtime routine. The reward is that you wake up the next morning feeling refreshed.

As long as you don’t ignore the cue, you will eventually establish a good habit. The best way to ensure you don’t ignore it is to make it obvious, attractive, easy or satisfying. The four most powerful ways to break bad habits is the inverse: make it invisible, unattractive, difficult or unsatisfying.

For example, when I was forming a daily meditation habit, I made it obvious by writing the word “meditation” on a sticky note and putting it on the bedside drawer I would walk past on my way to the bathroom. To make it easy, I put a chair in the bathroom and decided to meditate for only one minute a day immediately after I’d brushed my teeth.

To break a bad habit of eating sweets at work, I made it invisible, by putting any sweets in my backpack instead of on my desk. Then, to form the good habit of eating better snacks during the workday, I made it obvious, by having a piece of fruit next to my computer. When I was breaking the bad habit of not getting enough sleep each night, I made it unattractive by measuring the amount of sleep I got each night and showing the graph to my partner and boss each week.

Another way to make it easy is to make it small. Ask yourself, “What is the smallest possible version of this habit?” With sleep, I started by aiming for eight hours only before each workday, so that I could still do whatever I wanted at the weekend. It’s all about making it easier to get started, and being less likely to fail.

Avoid perfection

I really love the saying, “Measure what matters”. Whenever I want to change something, I always measure. I didn’t do this for the first 30 years of my life and it held me back. The easiest way to do this is with a spreadsheet. When I was forming the habit of getting more sleep, I would enter into the spreadsheet the time I went to sleep, the time I woke up, and the total amount of sleep I got. After a couple of months of doing this, there was no need to continue since the habit was so ingrained, but I still kept it up for a year.

These days, there are many smartwatches and apps that will automatically track this for you, and many other habits besides. They often have built-in incentives, such as encouraging you to compete or keep in touch with others, to ensure you’re held accountable. But you can also set up your own accountability cues.

“If I don’t meet my personal trainer at the gym, I don’t go,” says Kirwan. “If I meet someone somewhere, then I’ll go. If they’re not there, then I’ll roll over in bed. That’s just the way I am. And when you identify that as the way you are – strength or weakness – then you build things around you that will be important.”

It’s also important not to aim for perfection. If you were helping a friend build good habits and they missed a day, would you tell them to give up? Of course you wouldn’t. In the scheme of things, the occasional slip-up doesn’t matter that much.

Getting eight hours’ sleep before each workday changed my life. It gave me more energy, increased my patience and boosted my performance at work and at home. It all culminated in feeling the best I’ve ever felt, fabulous pay rises and … redundancy.

Yes, after all of that, I was laid off from the job I loved. Which only goes to prove that there will always be some things outside of your control – it’s an inevitable part of life. When I mentioned this to Kirwan at the end of our chat, he was kind enough to ask me a few questions about it. I admitted that at first it felt like a huge identity loss. However, because of all the work I’d done on taking ownership of my identity, I was still sure of who I was and I still had my good habits.

Jobs come and go, but identities are forever. So, who do you want to be?