Life is quite boring if you’re passive. If you’re just sitting around waiting for everything to happen to you, nothing magical, great, or in any way spectacular will most likely happen. The odds are against you.

When many people get to college, they think that their high school methods for making friends, studying, and keeping it all together will be good enough. “C’s get degrees”, texting people every so often, and vaguely keeping track of responsibilities on the phone just won’t cut it once you get to college.

Motivation is this magical thing that comes to most students the day before the deadline, towards the end of the semester, and when your grade just can’t afford another absence. Motivation is passive, and it’s something that happens to us. It’s unreliable, and it’s not something that we can control.

Certain pictures, ideas, or quotes can spurn motivation. People will create Pinterest boards full of “fitspo” or fit inspiration that includes photos of fit people, quotes about fitness, and plenty of photos of exercises. It’s not a bad thing to collect all of these concepts into one place that can be referred, but when it’s the only step someone is really taking towards their goal, it can be a bit hazardous.

This misconception that motivation is the key to success is so widespread that it can appear to be correct. Relying solely on motivation is not the simplest or most accurate way to achieve any goal that you may have. “When I feel like it” is the worst excuse for a student.

The other option in pursuit of happiness and greatness is to form habits that are worthwhile and sustainable. Habits take more than the commonly assumed 21 days to solidify. According to a study conducted in 2009 by the European Journal of Social Psychology, it takes about 66 days for a habit to become reflexive. Their study had a wide range of results from 18 days to 254 days for the habit to appear permanent.

Habits are defined in the study as “behaviors that are repeated in consistent settings that begin to proceed more efficiently and with less through as control of the behavior transfers to cues in the environment that activate an automatic response.”

This is a great representation of the process that you have to go through to break and form new habits. The journey requires awareness at the front end that you want to change a certain behavior. It also is easier according to this study and many others, that replacing a negative habit with a positive is easier than just “stopping something” as soon as you can.

I find that being a fulfilled human requires being an active human, and that’s why I’m choosing habits. It’s really hard to keep the consistency required in the beginning, but once you say specifically “I want to do this”, you can work your way up to it.

Who knows? Maybe for next semester, Thursdays will be the best night for studying, you’ll get a full 8-hours of sleep before exams, and you’ll look like all your “fitspo” boards.