Non-negotiable boundaries: An extreme but highly effective habit-forming hack

Everyone has ethical boundaries. Non-negotiables. Things that you’ll never do, lines you’ll never cross, people or causes you’ll rather die than to support, places you wouldn’t even get near within a mile. Perhaps these boundaries are based on your moral values and perspective on ethics. Maybe it’s from personal experience or past trauma. Or it’s even something you were simply brought up with and never questioned nor saw the need to question.

Basically, something you absolutely can’t live with if you ever did it.

These non-negotiable boundaries are just the hack you need to achieve any goal you desire, any habit you want to develop. Yes, you heard that right.

Any. Habit. You. Want.

Including your daily writing habit. How?

Here’s how Alice Wu, filmmaker, did it. She needed to finish up a first draft of a screenplay, and gave herself the ultimatum: if she didn’t finish it in five weeks, her best friend would mail her $1,000 cheque to the National Rifle Association, a cause that she would never support for personal and ethical reasons. She literally held the gun (lobby) to her head.

Finish by the deadline, or die a moral death.

Such an unusual but powerful way to achieve a goal or form a habit. Here’s how you can do it today:

• Just write a cheque for a substantial amount of money. How much is considered substantial is subjective, so best to come up with your own. $100 might be substantial to me but spare change to someone else.
• Write this to an organisation or cause that sickens you to the core to support. It could be the gun association, or some political party you hate, or greedy capitalistic company that you swore to never shop at. Address that cheque for them.
• Pass to a close friend who is strong-willed and will hold you to your word. Tell him/her that if you don’t develop that habit by the deadline you set out, he will then post that cheque to said organisation. And top that off, he will post it on social media and tag you, for added social pressure.
• And you’re set. See that habit form like it’s nothing, and achieve your goal.

Note though, that this hack is only as effective as you are serious when choosing the non-negotiable boundary and the right organisation to send to.

Very extreme, yes. But deadly effective.