Atomic Habits - How To Consistently Win
Looking back at my life I notice a pattern. I have a history of starting something, doing it for a while, then giving up. Then I’d start something new, do it a while then give up.
Does that sound familiar?
If so - I have the cure for you here.
Passion vs Habits
Let me introduce into the conversation the concept of Passion vs Habits.
Passion is like sugar in a diet. It is packed with high energy and quick to disappear.
Habits are like high quality nutrient rich food. Constant, slow release of quality energy.
Fueling your actions with Passion is sure to be short lived versus fueling your actions with Habits for the long game.
What is Passion
You are excited
It holds your focus and attention
It is fun
You do it if you want to
It is finite
What is a Habit
You have time carved off for tasks every day
You do it every day at the same time
It becomes part of your routine
It is not fun
You do it whether you want to or not
It is infinite
A great resource that covers this topic is this book. Atomic Habits (link below)
Routine
Routines are hard to break. By doing Habits frequently they become part of your routine. It soon becomes comfortable, pleasant and familiar.
When you want to achieve something, you should break it down into logical steps and logical tasks. This list should be a mile long.
Build this list and block out a timeslot in your calendar every day to work on this Habit. Aim for 15 minutes to start - but it could be any length.
I read a statistic somewhere saying that people who do a certain task 15 minutes a day turn into the top 1% globally for that topic. It doesn’t sound much time but over a year it really adds up.
Calm in the face of noise
There is so much media out there competing for our attention. I’ve been victim to it too.
The promises of passive income, side hustles, drop shipping, Amazon Affiliates, trading, crypto (not Bitcoin). It is all noise.
Having a long list of to-dos and a timeslot to do them keeps you on track and stops the winds of attention from buffeting you.
Make sure your life goals break down into yearly goals and they break down into your tasks to work through.
Your Thoughts?
Have you experienced Passion running out? What have you done to form Atomic Habits?
If you liked anything in this article please hit the restack button below!
A related article that covers on the identification of tasks and working through them systematically is linked below.
Thank you for a timely reminder.
I have drifted off course and need a practical plan to keep me disciplined.
The most important habit I have, ever since 2019, is that I've journaled every day as the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night, without exception. I use small paper journals from the Dollarstore with a clear vision for how I want my life to look and what is going well in my life on the front of the journal. I typically go through a journal every 8-9 months, so at the start of the journal I write down a goal I have for that period.
At the back of the journal, I put a cipher for my critical passwords for accounts that are most important to me. I try to have 25-30 character passwords that are so long I can't commit them to memory and I never use "Remember my password" features on any system. I have a mental algorithm I remember to have a different 20 characters for the middle sections of my passwords and change the first and last 5-10 characters of each one. I write down those first and last characters in my cipher.
The rationale being that the 20 characters I commit to memory would be very hard to brute force, hence someone who found my journal would not be able to log into any of my accounts without knowing the mental algorithm I have in my head.
At the same time, because I formed the habit of writing in my journal every day, morning and night, I always keep my journal somewhere safe and under my positive control.
While I have a routine for how I write in my journal, I also keep my most cherished memories and darkest secrets written in it.
In particular, because information systems are so prone to corruption (more so know as software quality standards have plummeted in the post-COVID lockdown years), forming this habit is critical, as reliance on digital information is extremely perilous.
You can't trust anything that's stored in the cloud or on some on-premise server owned by a corporation in the post-lockdown era, since no one can be trusted with anything (remember, everyone is lying to everyone all the time about everything, especially everyone in the corporate world).
Even data on local hard drives on mobile devices can't be trusted.
Having the habit of writing something down on physical object you maintain complete control over is the only way to be able to ground your perspective in objective reality, something very few people do these days and I believe is the reason our society is crumbling.