Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration readings from Chapter 11 of Atomic Habits by James Clear. The title of this chapter is “Walk Slowly, But Never Backward.”
Today’s chapter starts explaining the Third Law of Behavior Change: Make It Easy. Here are a few highlights from today’s readings:
- It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
- This is the difference between being in motion and taking action. When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. While all good things, they do not produce results.
- Action is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. Outlining twenty ideas for articles is motion. Actually sitting down and writing the article is action. Searching for a better diet plan and reading a few books on the topic is motion; eating a healthy meal is action.
- Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself.
- Most of us slip into motion rather than take action because we want to delay failure. It’s easy to be in motion and convince yourself that you’re still making progress.
- Motion makes us feel like we’re getting things done. But really, we’re just preparing to get something done. Our preparation becomes a form of procrastination. Thus, we need to change something. You don’t want to be merely be planning, you want to be practicing.
- If you want to master a habit, they is to start with repetition, not perfection. This the first takeaway of the 3rd Law: you must need to get your reps in.
- Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition. The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity.
- Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. This means that simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit.
- Habits form based on frequency, not time.
- Instead of asking, “How long does it take to build a new habit”, you should ask, “How many does it take to form a new habit?”
- To build a habit, you need to practice it. And the most effective way to make practice happen is to make it easy.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
There is nothing magical about time passing with regard to habit formation. It doesn’t matter if it’s been twenty-one days or thirty days or three hundred days. What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior. It’s the frequency that makes the difference.
Your current habits have been internalized over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of repetitions. New habits require the same level of frequency. You need to string together enough successful attempts until the behavior is firmly embedded in your mind.
In practice, it doesn’t really matter how long it takes for a habit to become automatic. What matters is that you take the actions you need to take to make progress.
