The proven, sensible secret to success

In the world of personal finance, there is a common phenomenon called "lifestyle creep." It describes our tendency to buy bigger, better, and nicer things when our income increases.

For example, let's say you get a promotion at your job and suddenly have $10,000 more income per year. Instead of saving the extra money and continuing to live, as usual, you're more likely to get a bigger TV, stay in better hotels, or buy designer clothes. Your normal lifestyle will slowly increase, and goods that were once considered luxuries will gradually become necessities. What was once unattainable will become your new normal.

Changing human behavior is often considered one of the most difficult things to do in business and everyday life. However, lifestyle creep describes a very reliable way in which human behavior changes over the long term.

What if we applied this concept to the rest of our lives?
Change your normal behavior
Let's list some typical financial goals.

I want to own a pair of designer jeans.
I want to have a bigger house.
I want to drive a faster car.
Here's the interesting part:

These big goals naturally arise as a side effect of having the means to achieve them. As our purchasing power increases, we tend to buy more as well. That's lifestyle creep.

What if similar side effects could occur in other areas of life?

Take these goals:

I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle.
I want to find a partner and get married.
I want to earn six figures a year.
I want to score higher on my test.
I want to own a successful business.
What if we trusted that more muscle, more money, or better grades were a natural side effect of improving our normal routines? In other words: As our normal habits improve, so will our results.

This idea of easily adjusting your habits until behaviors and results that were once unattainable become your new normal is a concept I like to call "habit creep."

How to practice habit creep
When you buy more things than your bank account can handle, that's not lifestyle creep. That's called debt.

If you adopt a new set of behaviors that you can't sustain, that's not habit creep either. In other words, the key is to avoid the trap of trying to grow too fast. Lifestyle creep happens so slowly that it is barely noticeable. So it should be with habit development. Your goal is to improve your behaviors in small steps.

In my experience, there are two main ways to change long-term behaviors and improve performance over the long term.

Increase your performance by a small amount each day. (Most people push this to the extreme).
Change your environment to remove small distractions and obstacles. (Most people never think about this).
Here are some thoughts on each of these points:

Increase your performance. You have a normal lifestyle. For example, your current level of physical fitness generally reflects how much you exercise in a normal day. Let's say your normal day requires you to walk 8,000 steps. If you want to improve your fitness, the standard approach would be to train for a race or exercise more. However, the habit improvement approach would be to add a very small amount to your standard behavior. Say, 8,100 steps a day instead of 8,000 steps. You can apply this logic to almost any area of life. You have a normal number of sales calls you make every day at work, a normal number of thank you notes you write every year, a normal number of books you read every month. If you want to become more successful, more grateful, or more intelligent, you can use the idea of habit creep to slowly improve these areas by simply improving the way you live your normal daily life.

Change your environment. There are all kinds of things we do every day that are a reaction to the environment we live in. We eat cookies because they're on the counter. We pick up our phone because someone is texting us. We turn on the TV because it's the first thing we see when we sit down on the couch. When you look at your surroundings

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