Some tiny changes in the form of good atomic habits make remarkable results. It’s nicely explained by the author James Clear in his book Atomic Habits.
- Have you ever imagined what cause the drastic changes in our lives we obviously don’t take any drastic bad steps with our life ?
- We just snoozed the alarm one more time in the morning, we just browsed through Instagram 10mins more every single day.
- These 1% changes are not easily noticeable but are far more life-changing than drastic steps.
“If you get 1% better every single day you will end up 37 times better than you present self in a span of a year and if you get worse 1% every single day we will end up reaching nearly 0.”
– James Clear
Habits and process are more important for success
- Habits are so underrated because of their under the hood behaviour and our shitty observation because they often don’t make any significant difference in our life unless we unlock a new level of performance.
- We think we will get linear progress as we go along with our practice.
- But this definitely ain’t the case i.e using the phone for 4 hours a single day won’t make our lives nasty or coding a single day for hours won’t make us Big Daddy Mark Zuckerberg.
- As you can see till the real graph cuts the imaginary one we feel bad as we are not making any progress but as soon as the graph cuts that point we end up being called the overnight success/failure.
Habits vs Goals
Problems with goals
- Problem-1: Winners and losers have the same goals, if having really ambitious goals was the only thing then everybody would have won the 100m Olympic race.
- Problem-2: Achieving a goal is just a momentary change but having good habits are a lifetime achievement.
- Problem-3: Goals restrict your happiness, behind any goal is this mentality that “I will be happy once I achieve this goal”. The problem of this goal-first mentality is that you are continuously putting happiness off until the next milestone whose probability to reach is hell low because you are not happy (check out our stash on motivation is a myth).
- Problem-4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress, This very closely resonates with us we studied hard for JEE because we wanted to enter into a good college now once we are in a good college mostly we have broken those habits that we had in our JEE prep life.😅
“The purpose of setting goals is to win the game, while the purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking and it’s a cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.”
– James Clear
From the book:-
Atomic Habits by James Clear