Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration readings from Chapter 20 of Atomic Habits by James Clear. The title of this chapter is “The Downside of Creating Good Habits.”
Today’s readings concludes the advanced tactics to help you go from being good to being great. Here are a few highlights from today’s readings:
- Habits create the foundation for mastery. Habits are the backbone of any pursuit of excellence.
- The benefits of habits do come at a cost, though. At first each repetition develops fluency, speed, and skill. But then, as a habit become automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback. You fall into mindless repetition. It becomes easier to let mistakes slide.
- When you want to maximize your potential and achieve elite levels of performance, you need a more nuanced approach. You can’t repeat the same things blindly and expect to become exceptional. Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice:
- Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
- To become great, certain skills do need to become automatic. But after one habit has been mastered, you have to return to the effortful part of the work and begin building the next habit.
- Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development. Old tasks become easier the second time around, but it doesn’t get easier overall because no you’re pouring your energy into the next challenge. Each habit unlocks the next level of performance. It’s an endless cycle.
- Although habits are powerful, what you need is a way to remain conscious of your performance over time, so you can continue to refine and improve. It is precisely at the moment when you begin to feel like you have mastered a skill that you must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency.
- The solution? Establish a system for reflection and review.
- Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement. Without reflection, we can make excuses, create rationalizations, and lie to ourselves. We have not process our determine whether we are performing better or worse compared to yesterday.
- Improvement is not just about learning habits, it’s also about fine-tuning them. Reflection and review ensures that you spend your time not he right things and make course corrections whenever necessary. You don’t want to keep practicing a habit if it become ineffective.
- The more sacred an idea is to us, the more strongly we will defend it against criticism. The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it become to grow beyond it.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting – even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.
A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
