One pushup a day – that is how Stephen Guise got himself into shape. Soon enough, that one pushup became many, then all of a sudden he was at the gym and taking on a full workout regimen.

Stephen Guise started “stupid small” as he puts it, in his new book “Mini Habits”.

Here in this post, I will go through some of his tips for you, while slanting things toward our mutual goal of CCIE.

• Imagine – determine where habits can improve your life and happiness. Of course, for us that is easy. We are so excited for the CCIE and we realize that making prep for it a habit can make a big difference.
• Solidify – take your big vision of achieving the CCIE and break it up into achievable targets. Habits help you jump from vague to hop-to-it.
• Train your brain – habits work because they form neural pathways associated with the behavior.
• Be patient – there is no set rule for how long it takes something to become a habit – it can vary from 18 days to 254 days.
• Slice and dice – set up mini-goals for something huge like achieving your CCIE.
• Inch up – if you are struggling with a task, break ip up into even smaller parts. This reminds me of taking something like the L3 MPLS VPN and breaking it up into much smaller pieces as we study, like how about just the MPLS part itself in the cloud first.
• Leap routinely – string several of your small actions together and now you have a powerful routine. For many students, this might mean, practice questions, reading, then a video viewing, then some lab practice. Every wonder why a CBT Nugget is about 10 minutes long? 🙂
• Start big – to be more productive all day, jump start it with some really important studying in the first 20 minutes or so…of course, just make sure you are actually awake!
• Keep it simple – don’t try and add too many new routines to your life too quickly.
• Map it out – be sure to track your progress as we have stressed here at our coaching site.

I hope this post has been informative for you, and I would like to thank you for reading!