Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration readings from Chapter 19 of Atomic Habits by James Clear. The title of this chapter is “The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work.”
Today’s readings continue in giving you advanced tactics to go from being good to being great. Here are a few highlights from today’s readings:
- The way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.”
- The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.
- When engaging in a task that is within that optimal zone of difficulty, your focus narrows, distractions fade away, and you find yourself full invested in the task at hand. This is the Goldilocks Rule at work.
- The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
- When you’re starting a new habit, it’s important to keep the behavior as easy as possible so you can stick with it even when conditions aren’t perfect.
- Once a habit has been established, however, it’s important to continue to advance in small ways. These little improvements and new challenges keep you engaged.
- Improvement requires a delicate balance. You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated. Behaviors need to remain novel in order for them to stay attractive and satisfying. Without variety, we get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.
- Many of us get depressed when we lose focus or motivation because we think successful people have some bottomless reserve of passion.
- Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
- Mastery requires patience. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes. Once the beginner gains have been made and we learn what to expect, our interest starts to fade.
- The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. As our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
- As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy – even if the old one was still working.
- No habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
- If you manage to start a habit and keep sticking to it, there will be days when you feel like quitting. But stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
We all have goals that we would like to achieve and dreams that we would like to fulfill, but it doesn’t matter what you are trying to become better at, if you only do the work when it’s convenient or exciting, they you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve remarkable results.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what it important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course why the urgencies of life.
When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood. Professionals take action even when the mood isn’t right. They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.
The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.
