UPDATE: Deep Dive: One size does not fit all when it comes to habit formation

Goals vs. habits. Big vs. small. Plus: Adapting to your learning style and neurodiversity.

UPDATE: This post was originally published as Premium-only content early in Optionality’s existence, so most folks who are subscribers now never saw it. Our theme for February, 2026, as we are in the back half of our Q1 Sprint, is about turning ideas into action. Quality habits contribute to setting and achieving important goals, but there is more than one way to set and track a habit! This deep dive explores different schools of thought around habits.

In December and January, much of the conversation on Optionality (and everywhere else I visited online), centered on goals. Or habits. Or intentions. Or words of the years. Whether you’re a devotee of SMART goals or BHAG goals (which I concede is like referencing ATM machines), you get the idea.

With so many different approaches to getting things done (or GTD as aficionados would call it), what do we really know about which approach works best? And how much does that depend on you, your brain and your learning style?

Trying to wrangle the information available on all of the above was made that much harder by seemingly contradictory information that is out there. The typical Google search results page I generated would include headlines trumpeting both “Impossible Goals Are Easier” and “To Achieve Big Goals, Start with Small Habits” in the top 5 results alone.

How are we to figure out what works for us amidst all these differing approaches and conflicting, yet all credible, advice?

Let’s look at some basic approaches, philosophies, and considerations:

Routines, habits, and the difference between them

This Harvard Business review article by Kristi DePaul rounds up some great sources on the topics of routines and habits…and how these are not interchangeable terms. Basically, a habit is something that is almost automatic, but in order to make something a habit you must include it in a routine. You may have heard me talk about habit-stacking, which attempts to codify the routines that can make desired behaviors become nearly-automatic habits. This approach has been evangelized in recent years by two leading authors on the subject, Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, and James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. Having read both books, I can say they each left me with a different new approach to defining habit-creating routines.

The Power of Habit spends more time on neurological research, i.e. the science behind how our brains form or break habits, and then applies its resulting approach across many different applications, from, yes, personal habits, to how a retail store like Target might use the known science to create the circulars they send to customers, to marketing messaging. Power of Habit introduced me to the cue-habit-reward cycle that resulted in my very first (and still very successful) habit-stack: I wanted to go for a walk every day in my neighborhood, so I stopped making coffee at home. I created a loop around my neighborhood that culminated at the closest Starbucks, at which I pick up my daily almond latte and walk home. So, if I want coffee, which I do, I need to walk to get it. In this particular example, the reward is enough of a driver that I don’t even need to do a cue (like leave my walking shoes in the middle of my office floor so I trip over them on the way to sit at my desk.)

Atomic Habits is a very straightforward, practical how-to on developing or breaking personal habits. (Clear’s author website also includes lots of resources worksheets, and the like…including how to apply the principles to business or to parenting). Upon reading Atomic Habits I realized I could leverage my successful existing cue-habit-reward cycle and augment it with other good habits, into more of a robust habit stack. If I got off on the right foot, I could knock out more behaviors-turned-good-habits. After reading Atomic Habits I consciously created what I call my morning habit stack: In order to get ready for my morning walk, to get my coffee, I get up and in quick succession do my morning skin routine, brush and floss, take my allergy meds, and apply sunscreen. Then immediately on getting back from the walk I take my vitamins. That’s 6 habits stacked one after the other, all motivated by a single reward. I then became motivated to make an evening habit stack to cement my commitment to some other behaviors that I wanted to turn into habits. I also leveraged the concept of “create the right environment” to increase my chances of being properly cued. Where is my bottle of vitamins? Where are my walking shoes? How do I plan and calendar to cook, and when do I pick the recipes? These are all questions I thought through and applied to my environment to increase my chances of success.

Do these habits ladder up into bigger-picture goals? Yes, absolutely. For me there’s the bigger-picture goal of health. I also have some bigger-picture goals around creativity and creation. And so on. But I learned long ago that I needed to break goals down into the very fundamental components…good habits…that IF I performed them consistently would THEN result in the big-picture outcomes I hoped for.

More resources:

• Clear actually steers us away from thinking about achieving goals and instead toward establishing systems, as a way of building more flexibility and satisfaction into over-arching approach. This article is a good example of that approach.

• Read more about habit formation in this article by Katy Milkman, author of How to Change.

Over in our new Optionality community, powered by Mighty Networks, we’re in the middle of our Q1 Sprint, Roadmap to Restoration…a 6-week structured course to help us select, ideate, and then turn ideas into action for 2026. Jory and I talked about what we’re personally learning from the Sprint in last week’s Conversationality:

Big or small…which is really best?

That brings us to the question: Is creating these pathways to automate small, repeatable, positive habits sufficient?

As it turns out, there is a definite “micro-habits” school of thought, but there is also a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) school of thought that we will do more, go further, if we reach higher.

The term BHAG itself comes from co-authors Jim Collins and Jerry Porass and their famous 1994 business tome, Built to Last.  This interview with Collins explains the concept in the context of setting goals for a company, and this article from company HelpScout puts that into specific action exploring how they’ve used BHAGs at their company. The pros are about the benefit of stretching one’s capabilities, assuming there’s more satisfaction in working hard and taking a challenging journey than in reaching a destination. And if you’re operating in an environment where failure is assumed as par for the course when going for the big goals, it can encourage more creative thinking and taking bigger swings, so to speak.

The grandfathers of “high, hard goals” are psychologists Gary Latham and Edwin Locke. As this Forbes article explains they conducted research in the 60s that not only proved the value of goal-setting in general in a work environment, but setting big goals. Earlier management thinking had assumed that goal-setting might be stress-inducing and that happy workers are productive workers, but that wasn’t the outcome of their research. Of course, even then they were seeing that alignment between the big goal and one’s values, and therefore an ability to believe in the goal and commit to it, was critical.

It’s important to point out that if the primary research supporting the efficacy of “high, hard goals” was conducted 50 years ago, chances are it was conducted in workplaces that were much more homogenous than today’s workplace. Men outnumbered woman 2-to-1, as just one example. I think about that “happy workers are productive workers” assumption that was disproved and wonder if it would, in fact, be proved if applied to women workers, GenZ or Millennial workers, and so on, today.

What story are you telling yourself about the habits you want to form?

I’ve known forever that storytelling trumps data if you want someone to both feel drawn in to what you’re telling them, find it resonant, and in fact retain your information. (Or perhaps I should say data’s role is to support storytelling.) But in my years of habit formation, I never told myself stories about the habits I wanted to create. Well, to be accurate, the story was that I had a goal and if I broke it down into digestible chunks and formed habits around those digestible chunks, I would increase my chances of forming the new habits and achieving the goal.

That works most of the time.

But every now and then I can’t seem to make a habit stick even though I’ve broken it down, I’ve applied both carrot rewards and stick consequences, and I’ve calendared it. Is it time to give up? Not according to Connie Kwan, creator of the 4Storyteller system to help leaders level up.

Connie’s system assumes that in order to change behavior, one must rewrite the story of why the new habit matters, connecting that habit to your core values as a better anchor. Her experience is that this approach helps people find a new path to a new habit.

She did an exercise with me to “debug” why I was having trouble sticking to my desired habit of practicing the piano 3 times a week.

Habit-formation Debugging with Connie Kwan:

1)    She asked me about my core values. I listed a few…I’m here on the planet to be helpful. I’m here to act with integrity and to advance justice, especially for those who have historically been marginalized or oppressed. I’m here to be authentic and to share what I know when I believe it can be, again, helpful. None of these core values really seemed to relate to playing the piano.

2)    So, next question: What is the story I was already telling myself about why I wanted to practice the piano?  My story was that I wanted to bring more creativity back into my life…I used to be a professional singer and actor and musician. 20 years ago, I sidelined those pursuits because I didn’t want to live paycheck to paycheck anymore; I was living back in Silicon Valley, and I thought getting into tech seemed like the obvious smart thing to do. I kept my hand in for a number of years, but eventually working in tech and then running a company didn’t align well with pursuing my creativity. Why didn’t this story of creativity serve me in this case? Because eventually I spent more and more time writing (and eventually podcasting) and while those pursuits are indeed creative, they were also mostly focused around tech, media, politics…aspects of my professional life. So, now I was associating creativity with professional pursuits, and piano still didn’t fit into that story.

3)    Is there another story I could tell myself? Well, the story we came up with (or dug out of me would be more accurate) is that I do believe that in this stage of my life one of my core values has to be to more consciously and intentionally take care of me. Self-care as core value seems a little squicky to me, but I can tie self-care to my other core values in this way: If I want to make impact, then it would be better if I could do that for a long, long time. A lot of my habits are about physical health, even intellectual health, but what about mental and emotional health? And this is where piano practice can contribute. Music connects me to emotion in ways few other things do. Playing piano takes that connection one step farther than listening to music…it integrates emotion and physicality. And it is really one of those rare things that can be just for me because I like it. Most of the time I practice on my 88-key keyboard with headphones on instead of on my actual piano. Clearly implied in the word “practice” is that I am not going to be good most of the time; I’m going to make mistakes and flub things up, but instead of feeling performance anxiety about it, I can keep it between me and my own ears.

Thanks to this exercise with Connie I have a new story I’m anchoring this habit to…and the story is tied to my core values. It’s early days, but so far in January I practiced 10 out of the first 25 days. Much more on track than I was throughout all of 2023.

2026 UPDATE: here in 2026, I realized I need to give myself a break from trying to cement this habit, after trying m multiple different stories and approaches to achieving it. I realized I needed fewer habits to hold myself to, and this one dropped, because I could never quite nail it. It has to be OK to consciously and thoughtfully let some stuff go.

Did you see we added a new, no-cost Community membership to our Mighty Network offerings?

Does your brain and learning style matter when strategizing forming habits?

Maybe it’s my contrarian nature, but I often look at advice about habit formation and think, “How can one size fit all? Who is this advice really for? And on the other hand, who is left behind by this advice?”

So, I dug in a bit to see if there were scholars, scientists, or just seekers who indeed acknowledged that we don’t all think or learn or achieve using the same approach or tactics.

Neurodiverse vs. neurotypical

A lot of the writings about habit stacking and formation blithely say that it takes 21 days of executing a habit to make it become routine. That may be true for many, maybe even most, people, but it is not true for everyone. I saw one article about establishing habits for neurodiverse people (particularly those with ADHD) that said 3 months was more like it. Even that is just an estimate, not a personalized prediction. Acknowledging that it may indeed take longer to form a sustainable habit could go a long way toward avoiding feelings of personal failure leading to abandonment of the effort. Here are three ideas from the resources below that seemed most important to successfully forming habits for neurodiverse people:

1)    Intrinsic motivation: Understanding one’s self-motivation (i.e. intrinsic motivation), not the external voices of should or must (i.e. extrinsic motivation). This ties back to the storytelling approach above.

2)    Ritual: Think about anything you currently do that is already a routine or ritual. Can you add anything to or associate anything new with it? Personal example: After I feed my cats I stand there and watch them eat…if I don’t, the chonky one will snag some of the skinny and easily distracted one’s food. It takes about 5 minutes. When I started thinking that I really wanted to stretch my body every day I saw a lot of feedback that doing it first thing in the morning, in or near bed no less, was the way many people go. That did not appeal to me, but I realized I had this empty five minutes, and I could certainly come up with a quick 5-minute stretch routine to execute while watching my cats eat.

3)    Start small and use all the tips, tricks, and tools: Try for one new habit at a time, don’t overwhelm yourself, and take advantage of all the tools you can. Set alarms, post reminders or affirmations in visible places, send yourself texts, leverage reminders and notifications. (Another reason starting small and simple is important is so that you don’t set yourself up to receive tons of beeps and bloops, triggering an anxiety response.) See below for aligning these tools and tips for your own learning style, which is separate from whether you are neuro-diverse or not.

More resources:

• Professor Amanda Kirby, a neuro-diverse doctor, writes about habit stacking and neuro-diversity here.

• Anxiety and ADHD therapist Danielle Wayne digs into habits and executive functioning and why having ADHD may require throwing conventional wisdom about habit formation out the window here.

Audio vs. visual vs. kinesthetic learning styles and habit formation

Neuro-diversity aside, we don’t all learn the same. I was curious if there was any research out there that indicated that one should strategize habit formation differently depending on how we best learn. The short answer is that that info isn’t out there in some spoonfeeding package. The key seems to be to adapting the “cue” part of the cue-habit-reward cycle to your learning style. My stretching while watching the cats eat is a kinesthetic cue…I wash the fork, clean out the cat food can before tossing in the recycle bin, walk over to watch the cats and start stretching. Posting a sticky-note in a place you know you will see it is a visual cue. The beeps and bloops from notifications can be an auditory cue. (You can also be more aligned with the visual pop of a notification, or an icon bouncing in your laptop dock.) I also like the kinesthetic aspect of “reward” by checking things off lists or marking a habit done in my habit-tracker act. But I also enjoy the visual reward of seeing that completed list or the bar charts my habit-tracking app gives me of habits executed.

What should you do?

After scanning and synthesizing the numerous articles, reports, and indeed whole books, on this topic, the single most important guidance seems to be: Know thyself. There is ample room to personalize your approach to habit formation and adherence. Examine how you currently operate, and find the fertile ground for planting those habit seeds and seeing them flourish.

it’s your turn to spill! I’m particularly curious to know if you’ve ever found advice in this realm to feel too one-size-fits-all, and how you’ve personalized it to increase your chance for success? Let us know!