Not long, but it requires two readings.
An enormous quantity of material online offers techniques of change.
The whole world has developed every possible technique to redeem you from every failing — smoking, loneliness — and to lift you towards every dream.
And you sit back, move the mouse a little, and simply have to choose. Marvellous, isn't it?
Well, no.
The technique comes second.
At the first stage you meet, face to face, two tedious and essential words: internal commitment.
In plain language: you stand in front of the mirror and swear by everything dear to you that you will not remain in this wretched state. That you are willing to do anything and to hurt in order for this to succeed. That there is no possibility of your being stuck in this mediocrity a year from now.
No possibility. It will not happen. You will not let it happen. You will try and try and switch and fall and come back and investigate until you find what works.
You have to commit to it properly.
Committed?
Good. Now go and change.
And here is why the order matters, rather than being a piece of rhetoric. Techniques fail constantly. That is normal — most of them are wrong for most people, and finding the one that fits you requires running through several that do not.
A person with the commitment treats a failed technique as information and reaches for the next one. A person without it treats the same failure as proof that change is not available to them, and stops.
The identical event, in both cases. Which is why collecting techniques is so seductive and so useless: it is work on the part of the problem that was never the obstacle.