A few years ago I was a full time smoker averaging nearly 30-40 cigarettes per day. If you don’t know about smoking, this number is large and it meant that I was climbing the ladder of health destruction rather quickly.

Did I know the devastating effects and health implications of smoking? Sure I did; I was living them each and every day – no exceptions. But the pain of smoking wasn’t big enough for me to quit. I tried several times, but none of them was a deadly-serious sort of attempt.

Years after smoking I decided to finally quit, and I never looked back since. Several factors played an important role of me being able to finally quit. When I analyze the situation, I can chuck them down a few fundamental factors. In this article I’m going to talk about the first one.

When you take a decision, make it extremely hard/embarrassing/devastating for you to break it and go back to where you’ve been.

This means that you have to do whatever it takes to assure that you can’t go back. Burn all the ships, go public with your decision and announce it to friends and colleagues, stand up in the middle of a crowded street and scream your intention out load or even threaten to beat yourself up. Just do whatever it takes.

In order to succeed, you have to figure out what makes you tick and also what makes you stick – to your decisions of course! The later might not be so attractive to you, but still you have to punish yourself when necessary.
In my case I immediately announced my decision online so that my friends will know about it. Here’s the post I made back then:

Then to broaden the circle of potential embarrassment, I started an initiative to promote healthy smoke-free lifestyle in my university. I called it “ShababCare” –Shabab is an Arabic word that means the youth-, launched a Facebook page for it Link. And to make sure that enough people hear about the initiative and ride along with me, I reached out to friends whom I knew hated smoking so much that they were willing to participate in any campaign against it.

To go even further, I emailed the student affairs department at my university promoting the initiative and asking them to forward it for all students and staff members. Within one week, almost everybody in my university knew about my decision or at least heard about “ShababCare” initiative. Not all of them liked the Facebook page of course, but going public alone was enough for me to think 10 times before even thinking of returning back to smoking again.

Almost a year later I discovered that this method –self-punishment/threat- is actually a scientific strategy pioneered by the Noble-prize winning economist Thomas Schelling. The idea is simply: if you fail to achieve your goal, you give money to a charity of your choice. The tricky part is that: You must pledge to give to a charity that you HATE.

This strategy alone might not be 100% effective on the long run. You have to support it with other strategies to make sure that your decision becomes permanently carved in stone; I will dive deep into the strategic power pack I used in future articles. However, it is a great technique to start with and it gives you enough momentum to depart the runway.

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Photo: Celestine Chua

So, do you have a similar experience with smoking? Have you tried this strategy with other areas in your life and succeed? Please share your ideas and feedback in the comment section beneath.