#297 - From Crime to Coding: How to Build Bullet Proof Habits in 2026

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit."

Habits beat motivation; small, daily actions reshape identity and make success inevitable without relying on willpower.

The problem is that most people create goals with no system in place. They rely on raw, fragile willpower and motivation and then wonder why they fail.

Let's explore how to make habits that actually stick to give you the best possible chance of success in the new year.

Shameless Plugs

Join Our Christmas Coding Launchpad below to land your first dev role in 2026 👉 www.parsity.io/christmaslaunchpad

🧑‍💻 Free 5 day email course to go from HTML to AI

🤔 Got a question you want answered on the pod? Drop it here

Apply for 1 of 12 spots at Parsity - Learn to build complex software, work with LLMs and launch your career.

AI Bootcamp (NEW) - for software developers who want to be the expert on their team when it comes to integrating AI into web applications.

Chapters

• 0:00 From Chaos To Sobriety
• 1:34 Habits Over Willpower
• 2:29 Remove Temptation, Shape Your Environment
• 3:42 Making Habits Inevitable
• 6:16 Fit Habits To Your Real Life
• 7:23 Consistency Over Perfection
• 9:45 Identity, Not Deadlines

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Develop Yourself Podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network, and more. I'm Brian, your host. When I tell people I had a pretty non-traditional path into being a software engineer, I don't just mean I didn't have a computer science degree. You see, a little over 10 years ago, I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, living what can only really be described as a criminal lifestyle. And if you go to my LinkedIn, you'll see before 2013, I don't really have any job history. And that's because the stuff I was doing couldn't really be put on LinkedIn. In all honesty, I had a terrible drug addiction, alcohol dependency issues, and was speedrunning my way through life. And I was going to either end up in a jail cell or dead within due time. Long story short, I had an intervention, got sober, found a lot of time on my hands. And then, fast forward less than a year later, I was into my first software developer job. I picked up running, I stopped smoking, I haven't gone back or fallen off the wagon in over 12 years. Now, how the hell did I make this happen? Short answer is habits. I didn't go to AA, I didn't have any professional treatment, and I'm not saying those things aren't necessary or really good. It's just not something that I did. But even without going to these programs, I basically stumbled upon a lot of the same knowledge and tactics and practical steps that I want to share with you if you're looking to pick up good habits. So whether you want to lose 10 pounds or learn to code or stop yelling at your kids or stop smoking or whatever, I want to offer you some things that I've done myself, which may help you as you enter into 2026 and help you develop habits that actually stick. There's this quote that sticks in my head that is kind of harsh, but I think really sums up what a lot of us feel. We are not really who we say we are. We are what we do. What more are we than a collection of our habits? Habits are incredibly important. We pick them up by accident, often in response to life or stresses. This is why I picked up alcohol and drugs at a young age. And then they snowball. Then they become this default knee-jerk response to a chaotic world. Now, good habits and bad habits are just habits. I picked up tons of incredibly bad habits over the years. Now, going down that shady evil path made me realize how strong habits are. And it taught me a lot about how you pick them up. And if there's only one thing I hope you take away from this, if you click off right now, just know this that consistency beats intensity every single time. And I'll get into that too, because that's way too fluffy. It's not practical enough. And I want to give you some actual advice that you can use in your own life. So the first thing that I did when I wanted to stop drinking or smoking, or basically when I had the ultimatum to stop drinking or smoking through that intervention, is I just got rid of all the alcohol, all the cigarettes, all the dope, all the stuff that I wanted to get my hands on, got rid of it immediately that day. And that way I couldn't tempt myself. See, here's the thing: I don't believe in willpower, and I'd already tested my willpower times before this. I wanted to quit before, and I'd say, oh, I'm gonna quit this time just tomorrow. I'll wait for this thing, I'll wait for this magical moment to happen. That magical moment came through an intervention, right? So I got rid of everything in the house. I said, why even tempt myself? I know I don't have the willpower for this kind of thing. If I see a beer or alcohol or even anything that I could get my hands on that would give me that little brush of dopamine, I'm gonna take it. So I'm not gonna have it in the house. I do the same thing now with sweets, treats. If I have a cake and I eat a piece of the cake and I'm like, you know what? I'm not gonna trust myself around this cake. I'm throwing the cake away. I don't care if people say you're wasting money. There's some starving kid out there in Canada who wants that cake. I'm throwing the cake away. I don't want to tempt myself. Have your habits conform to your life, not the other way around. There's a theme throughout the advice that I'm going to give, and it's basically this make it hard to fail and make it very simple for you to succeed. Which leads me to my next piece of advice, which is to make your habits inevitable. After I quit drinking and doing drugs and running the streets and all this kind of stuff, I had a lot of time in my hands. And I was like, what am I gonna do? I was driving for Lyft at the time, also. I had actually gotten to a quote unquote square job, a legal profession at this time. And I was driving Lyft and Uber on the side. I met software engineers, I heard about code, and I'm 30 years old at this point, or 29 or 30 or something like that. And I didn't even know that software engineering was like a thing or code was a thing. I got introduced to code. I was kind of blown away by it. I'm like, this is how you make websites. And I'm like, well, now I got to learn how to do this. And I just got hooked. It was like solving puzzles. It gave me that little bit of dopamine that I really, really needed and craved. And solving these coding puzzles was incredibly fun for me to do. But then I wanted to make it a career. And I thought, damn, if I can get paid to do this, well, hey, I just won the game. Now keep in mind, I had two young kids at the time, one of whom was a toddler, and I really had no time on my hands. I had a super long commute and I'm doing like three jobs and I'm getting sober and all this kind of stuff. So I knew that I had to make time for coding to happen. So one, I cut out all sorts of other distractions. I don't really watch sports, but I had picked up sports watching is just kind of a thing. I cut that out. I'm like, I'm not spending three hours on Sunday watching football. Then I'd have my laptop right on the kitchen table. I'd wake up around 30 minutes early every day before my kids would get up and scream or whatever, or before I had to rush out the door and fight that insane commute to get to work. I'd use that 30 minutes to do coding. It was super simple. It was a very easy reminder. We lived in a small condo, I didn't have a lot of room or space, so I just put my laptop on the table. So as I'm walking down the hallway, getting ready to leave, I'd see the laptop there and get right to work. When I wanted to pick up running, I did something similar. I got running shoes, I put them by the door. And then it would be a reminder, oh yeah, you're supposed to do that thing. Same thing with journaling. I bought a 99 cent notebook from this door. I put it next to my bed with a pen and I made it really simple to look over and remind myself, hey, remember that thing you said you were gonna do? Now you have no excuse. You should probably do that thing. And lastly, when I wanted to start reading, I hadn't read in years. Now I read a ton of books and I read them all through my Kindle. This way, when I was on the train or bored, I could just look at my phone and realize, oh, there's no excuse for me to do it now. I could look at my phone and realize I had no excuse. Time to crack open that book that I said I'd be reading. And the big takeaway here is that your habits must conform to your life and not the other way around. If you don't like reading physical books, then read Kindle. If you know that you're gonna eat those sweets, then don't have them in the house. If you know that you're not a morning person, then stop trying to act like you're a morning person and do stuff in the morning. Do stuff that makes sense for you, not some idealized version of who you think you are. And now this last piece of advice is the one that people never take. And it's the one that is probably the most important consistency over perfection. You're never gonna have enough time. The situation's never gonna be right. Here's a lot of people do they say, I want to run this year, I'm gonna lose 10 pounds, I'm gonna hit the gym. And they hit the gym for an hour or two hours or some insane amount of time. And then a few more weeks in, they give up. They can't keep up with the schedule. They couldn't do an hour, so they'll wait for the weekend. I'll do three hours on the weekend. People couldn't find an hour to code one day, so they do six hours on the weekend. You're doing it completely wrong. You need to make your habit sticky, not perfect it or worry about the time you spend doing it. The compounding effect is what ultimately kept me sober and made these habits stick. Some days I would have 45 minutes to do my work. Some days I'd have 10. Some days I'd have five. I knew that it was more important to feed the habit. Kind of like some of my really negative habits that I got, I got them through consistency. It wasn't every day that I had a ton of money to blow on all sorts of illicit drugs. I'd do a little bit here, a lot there, and a little bit on other days. I would just keep the habit going until my brain really made this very strong connection between free time and you're gonna get obliterated. That same connection I wanted to create for good habits as well. And I know how easy it is to have these habits sneak into your life. The same can be said for good habits. A bad habit could start with drinking a few beers on a Sunday or doing a few nose beers on a Tuesday. Next thing you know, you do it on a Wednesday or a Thursday. Next thing you know, you go from a weekend party animal to a seven-day-a-week abuser that needs an intervention. Now, good habits work very much the same. You want to start running, you start with maybe a mile here, half a mile there, a quarter mile. You run a few minutes a day. That will add up over time. If you run a few minutes every single day for a week, I guarantee you by the end of that week, you're gonna be in a much different state than you were a month ago. And if you continue doing that for months, you're gonna be able to almost run a marathon. And if you keep building that up for months, you're gonna be almost unrecognizable. It's about making those small daily deposits, not these large, lofty things that we often just fail to do. And lastly, I would say stop putting time frames around stuff. Think of your transformation as more of an identity shift rather than just trying to hit some goal. It's not that I want to lose 10 pounds. It's like I'm a runner, I'm a lifter now. That is who I am. I'm not, I'm gonna get sober. I'm just a person who doesn't drink. I also didn't put any time limits on it. When people ask me, even now, hey, are you ever gonna drink again? I don't know. As cliche as it sounds, I just say today I'm not, tomorrow I'm probably not, I'm probably not next week, but I don't know. No one really knows the future. And as much as I have a strong conviction and I have 12 years of sobriety behind me, I can back up, I just don't know. So I don't put limits on it at all. I just say not today. So, in closing, whether you want to start a business, learn to code, get sober, get in shape, do any of these things. It just comes from building a system of habits that you are consistent with and making sure that they actually fit into your life and that you do them. The most underrated life hack of all is you can just do stuff. You don't have to wait for permission or wait for all the right conditions or wait for motivation. Motivation rises and falls. Habits are a response to help us circumvent that and just have this knee-jerk response to life. If you do something every day, it's gonna feel really weird if you stop doing it. That is why doing even a tiny bit, that two minutes or five minutes, whatever time you can have to keep that habit alive is the most important thing you can do. I wish you all the luck as you enter into the new year. And if you are struggling with addiction or having issues like that, just know you're not alone. I'm not a doctor or a psychologist. I'm barely a software engineer, right? But just know that there's more of us out there than share it online. And I only started sharing this recently because I have enough credibility at this point where I feel a little more comfortable sharing this not so glamorous part of my life. But just know that no matter how stuck you are down in that hole, that pit of despair, realize there's a way out. Now I am a cornball because I am also a father, and we all need a little bit more corniness in our life in this era of doom and gloom. But if that helped you in any way, I'm thankful and I really hope your years are off to a great start. Hope you found that helpful, and I'll see you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsity.io. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.