If we want to change your lives we're often told that we need to think big, make drastic changes or perhaps even move across continents but what if we could achieve major transformations just through small tweaks to our daily routines, we all tend to overestimate the importance of single actions and underestimate the power of making small improvements repetitively over a longer period of time.
Real change comes from the compound effects of hundreds of small decisions or small habits that over time accumulate to produce remarkable results, changing the lifestyles behaviors and identities.
We're talking about Atomic Habits by James
Which is all about the power and process of building good habits and breaking bad ones through examples from sports, business and education along with evidence from psychology and neuroscience.
The book explains the science and practical implications of how tiny habits and minuscule changes can grow into life-altering outcomes and help us lead healthier happier and more productive lives.
So there's basically four key insights from this book that we're going to talk about in turn:
First thing, we'll talk about the power of 1% changes over time.
Secondly, why we should screw goals and focus on systems instead.
Thirdly, why it's all about identities rather than outcomes.
and Finally, we'll look at what our boy James calls the four fundamental laws of behavior change.
So firstly,
Why does 1% matter well it's all about the power of compounding. Compounding can be amazingly powerful both positively and negatively if we leave it to develop over a period of time if we can get 1% better each day for a year we'll end up 37 times better by the time we're done. But if we get 1% worse each day for one year we'll go down nearly to zero as James says in his book.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Habits don't seem to make much difference on a given day but the impact over months or years can be absolutely enormous.
We don't often think about these small changes just because it takes so long to see the result, like this is something that I really struggle with and I think this probably applies to everyone.
Like we're so attuned in modern society to try and seek instant gratification. That it's actually really hard to focus on things that have long-term benefits equally the slow rate of transformation also means that it's really easy to let bad habits creep in like competing badly and not exercise and when we repeat these 1% errors a day after day they'll accumulate into larger problems.
As James says in the book time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it in good habits make time you ally and bad habits make time your enemy.
One of the other key points from James's analysis of habits is what he calls the plateau of latent potential which sounds all very fancy habits often don't seem to make a difference until we cross a critical threshold. We expect progress to be linear but the key aspect of any compounding process is that the outcomes are delayed.This leads to an initial valley of disappointment, where we don't feel like we're making progress as the results.
Don't follow the linear trajectory that we expect and so we just give up because we're not getting the results we wanted but as we can see from the graph it does take time to build a habit to allow the compound interest of self-improvement to have take hold and give us amazing results over time.
Key point number two from the book is,
To screw goals and focus on systems instead.
James identifies four main problems with goal-setting:
Firstly, winners and losers have the same goals.Every Olympian wants the gold medal, every candidate wants the job and so it can't be the goal that actually differentiates people.
Secondly, achieving a goal is only a momentary change. Sure I might be able to pluck up the activation energy too and bring myself to clean my room but if I continue my waste man-- habits and systems that led to the room getting messy in the first place I'm just gonna be left with a messy room again. In a few days time in the same way when we achieve a goal we only change a life for the moment we get these temporary results instead.
What we really need to change is the systems that cause those results in the first place.
Thirdly, James argues that goals restrict our happiness there's an implicit assumption behind any goal and that's once I reach my goal then I'll be happy and so we end up continuously putting off happiness until the next milestone. Finally goals are our odds with long-term progress.
There's another really nice quote:
" The purpose of setting goals is to win the game, the purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. "
James says the ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of our identity. When we solve problems in terms of outcomes and results, we only solve them temporarily. But to solve problems in the longer term at the system's level we need to change our identity.
We can actually split up the process of building habits into four stages cue craving response and would the cue triggers the brain to initiate an action the craving provides the motivational force. The response is the action or habit that we perform and the reward is the end goal and it's these four things cue craving response and reward which lead to what James calls the four laws of behavior change.
Principle of environment design in general which is you, want to put fewer steps between you and good behaviors and more steps between you and the bad ones.
Imagine the cumulative impact of living an environment that exposes you to the cues of your positive habits and reduces the cues of your negative habits.
It's kind of like you're just gently being nudged in the right direction each day.
Law is make it attractive which relates to the craving aspect of the habit loop and tries to take advantage of what we know about dopamine as humans were all motivated by the anticipation of reward so making habits attractive will help us stick to them.
Another Law is make it immediately satisfying our brains have evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards and the cardinal rule of behavior change is what is immediately rewarded is repeated and what is immediately punished is avoided.
We get short-term bursts of dopamine from going through the McDonald's drive-through or scrolling aimlessly through Instagram making us more likely to repeat these bad habits to develop better habits.
James says that we should try to attach some form of immediate gratification so that we can make the habit immediate satisfying.
Hope you like the article, share , like and comment down below will be appreciate.
Comments
Post a Comment