Dirty Chai with Chio - Ep 6 - Atomic Habits

James Clear's book "Atomic Habits" discusses the concept of making small daily improvements to achieve big results. He argues that real change comes from the compound effect of small decisions rather than massive actions. Clear explains that doing 1% better every day can lead to significant outcomes over time. Conversely, doing 1% worse daily can have a negative compound effect. Clear emphasizes that slow and quiet change is often overlooked in our culture of instant gratification. He uses examples to illustrate how small choices can compound into either positive or negative outcomes. The book encourages readers to examine their habits and determine if they are pointing them in the right direction. Clear believes that outcomes are a lagging measure of habits and that time magnifies the margin between success and failure. Positive compounding occurs when 1% improvements are made daily, while negative compounding happens when negative habits are repeated over time. Clear shares personal Hello, hi, welcome to this week's installment of the Dirty Chat Podcast with me, your host Chiu. And today we're discussing one of my favorite books, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it's one of my favorite books because it is useful, and I love a useful book. The book is really built around a revolutionary system, according to the blurb, to get 1% better every day. You see, people think that when you want to change your life, you need to think big. But world-renowned habits expert James Clear states in the book that he has discovered that real change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small decisions, like doing two push-ups a day, waking up five minutes earlier, or reading just one more page. He calls these atomic habits, quite like his book. In this groundbreaking book, James reveals why he thinks that these miniscule changes can grow into such life-altering outcomes. He uncovers simple life hacks, and he delves into cutting-edge psychology and neuroscience to explain why they matter. And along the way, he tells inspiring stories of Olympic gold medalists, leading CEOs, and distinguished scientists who have used the science of tiny habits to stay productive, motivated, and happy. I like the blurb from the book because it summarizes quite neatly what the book is about. And what I have thought to do here is to summarize the big idea around why small habits make a huge difference, according to James Clear in his book. One of the principles that he has in this book—I mean, I could never do the book justice in a 30-minute podcast by summarizing everything in it. I have to pick and choose. So I am going to share with you three of my favorite ideas from the book. And there might be some overlap with other ideas, but I will focus primarily on the ideas that develop the concept of small habits making a remarkable change or leading to a remarkable result. I love this idea so much because I believe in practicality, I believe in sensibility, I believe in sustainability when making changes to one's life. I believe that if you are going to have holistic, professional, and personal success, which is what this podcast is all about, you need to be able to sustain whatever it is that you are changing to achieve those outcomes over a long period of time, otherwise it's not success. I have always said I don't believe in bubblegum things and in instant fixes and instant gratification because the results of those things are never sustainable. So what does James Clear say is sustainable? One of the things that he talks about, and I thought was quite a big idea, is the concept of getting 1% better or worse over time, or 1% better or worse daily. So he argues that it is easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and to underestimate the value of small daily improvements. You see there's that big push to achieve something, let's say you're looking for a job, it's the sudden revamping of the LinkedIn profile and expecting to get hits that immediate day versus dutifully going on there every day, connecting with at least one person, sending at least one person a message over a sustained period of time. He thinks that in our society, we have incorrectly created a correlation between massive success and massive action, as if a massive story of success must automatically have come from massive action. But that's not the case. And he gives examples that we can all relate to, losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship. These things might appear to be an earth-shattering event, but the buildup to that event is never one earth-shattering event. The buildup to that moment is showing up for practice every day. It's making a choice about what you eat nutritionally every day. It's what to use your money for and how you save your rands and cents as you're building your business. It's showing up and writing two pages for your book on a daily basis. That's how you end up with a whole book. In short, he argues that when you do 1% towards what you need to achieve on a daily basis, you actually are more likely to achieve a huge outcome over time. But here's the thing and the challenge with this. 1% is notable or even noticeable at first, but it is far more meaningful in the long run. The difference over time that doing 1% better every day makes is astounding. Mathematically speaking, if you get 1% better every day or you move 1% every day towards a particular goal, at the end of a year, you are 37 times better than you were when you started that year. If, on the contrary, you do 1% worse daily because this cuts both ways, the compound effect is that you decline to nearly zero. Habits, then, are the compound interest of self-improvement. What a remarkable thought, right? It is so simple but yet so profound. Just as money grows through compound interest, the effects of habits compound slowly and quietly. The thing is, though, that slow and quiet change puts off a lot of people in our culture. The culture that we have is one of instant gratification. It means we want results now. We want to immediately have the book that we are writing. We want to immediately win the championship. We want to immediately feel better and healthier. If you do a three-minute French lesson today, you haven't suddenly become French-speaking. Ask me. I know. I've been learning French for a while and I've done it via different mediums. I'm not sure how much French I speak now, but I do know I passed a fairly hard test the other day. If you go to the gym today, it doesn't mean you can automatically now bounce a coin off your glutes. If you save a little money today, you are still not a millionaire. Now, this way of thinking allows a lot of us to bail out of the goal that we are trying to achieve. It allows us to say, ah, this isn't working, as soon as we start. This flawed flow of thought applies just as easily to negative habits. You might pick up an unhealthy meal and think, one unhealthy meal doesn't automatically make me unhealthy. This is true. One late night without seeing the kids doesn't make me a bad parent. A single decision is hardly life-changing. Wrong. The same single decision, repeated every day over a sustained period, results in a particular type of outcome. Allow me to read you a quote from the book. When we repeat 1% errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It's the accumulation of many missteps, a 1% decline here and a 1% decline there. That is what eventually leads to the problem. It is the exact same thing that could lead to a great outcome if you are going in the opposite direction. However, the 1% decline has a way of offering instant gratification as you slowly slide down that road, that it is less noticeable and less notable. The impact is illustrated quite clearly and cleverly by James Clear in his book with an example of a pilot flying from LAX, which is in Los Angeles, to New York City. If the pilot shifts the nose of the plane by just 3.5 degrees south, in other words, the plane moves its nose by only 2.3 meters, 92 inches. He will land 362 kilometers, also 225 miles, away in Washington, D.C. How wild is that? 2.3 meters, only 92 inches, over distance and time becomes 362 kilometers or 225 miles. Over distance and time, the effect of slowly moving in the wrong direction compounds dramatically. The effect of slowly moving in the right direction compounds dramatically. 1% choices over a lifetime are everything. 1% choices over a single day or a short window of time do not seem to produce any results. So ask yourself, rather than what is my goal, ask what your habits are pointing you towards. Are your habits pointing you in the right direction over time? Where are your current 1% habits pointing? To what goal are you aimed, whether you intend it or not? You see, your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits, according to him. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. Lord, help me with this one. And all time does is magnify the margin between success and failure over time. To our earlier point, this compounding effect happens both in the positive and in the negative. Positive compounding, your productivity would increase with a 1% increase daily. Your knowledge would increase as you increase your learning habits daily. Your relationships improve as you invest 1% in them daily. Negative compounding is, if you feed negative thoughts a little at a time every day, they grow. Outrage. Bitterness. Speaking from experience, I remember pulling myself up just as I approached the end of my divorce process, I remember. And I remember telling everyone in my life, and it felt like such a Herculean task, and it often does when a person is hurt, it felt like such a Herculean task to stop thinking and talking about what had been done, and what had been said, and how I'd been hurt. And I remember asking my friends for help, my friends and family. And that was my version of a 1% move in the right direction. I said, do not enable me, do not allow me to talk about this needlessly. I removed myself from spaces where people sought to actively talk about it. And it was quite hard at the time. Two years later, it's something I hardly think about. I formed new neural pathways, and I actually have more productive thoughts, healthier thoughts, and happier thoughts, because my 1%, in that particular arena, led me to a positive outcome. I've also seen, to be fair, people who've not made that choice. And I understand it, because like I said, it's a very difficult thing, and people are going through a lot of pain when these things happen. I've also seen people who have elected not to make that choice. And 10 years post-divorce, their bitterness has compounded, as though the divorce was not only yesterday, as though the pain was also yesterday. This is a choice, a 1% move, that each person who's gone through something painful, whether a heartbreak or betrayal of some sort, has to consciously make, because the compounding effect speaks for itself in that arena. This is not an example from the book, it's a personal example, I just felt like it was one that I could deliver a little bit better. What progress really looks like is not what media and TV have shown us. Progress for most people looks like melting a block of ice in a room. Where the room temperature is minus 10 degrees, the block of ice will sit frozen on the table. The temperature will rise to minus 9, and it will rise to minus 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, minus 1, and the block of ice will sit on that table. And then it will take over from minus 1 degree to 0, and the block of ice will turn to water. Sudden, right? But not. The compound effect of the temperature slowly rising is what appears to make a dramatic difference in the shift by one degree, but in truth it is the shift by each degree that has brought us to that outcome. There is no real boom. Overnight success actually comes in degrees over time. Similarly, habits appear to make no difference until you cross over a critical threshold of consistency. Malcolm Gladwell calls it the tipping point in his book. Bamboo can barely be seen for five years while it grows extensive roots underground, and then seemingly suddenly it shoots 30 meters into the air within six weeks. That period where it is building that extensive underground network of roots, five years, is a really long time for someone to wait for an outcome. Now that waiting period might not be as dramatic in real life for certain things, but it certainly presents itself every time someone is trying to achieve something. And James Clear has a name for that early and middle part of limited evident results. He calls it the valley of disappointment. It's that stage where you go for a run as best as you can every day for a week, and you get on the scale and you still weigh the same. And I use an example, a weight example, because this is something a lot of people struggle with, or this is something a lot of people can relate to, but it can be anything. It can be writing every day for a week and you still don't have a complete book. It's when the habit is right, but the results are not matching what you think you should be getting. This is called, again, the valley of disappointment. So if you look at it on a graph, at this point, you are ticking along time-wise, but you don't seem to be gaining any height on your graph. And I feel that I saw that the most with my running. I didn't run much before I had the kids. I was fit because I played hockey, I played league hockey, I exercised. I was just generally really fit. Then post-babies, I couldn't play hockey and I didn't want to. I had sort of evolved past that. But I still wanted to be fit, so I decided to take up running. I tried going to the gym. I found that entirely traumatic at that time, because getting there, getting parking, getting inside, working out what I was going to do, then leaving, all of that felt like it was a lot of time away from the baby. And you know, sometimes when you are a new mom, you haven't figured out how to not be with your baby. You create a lot of anxieties in your head, and I found going to the gym was particularly stressful. I wanted to work out for 35 minutes and be done, and I found putting on running kit and running out the house was the perfect medium for me. That's how I started running. And at that time, I think I would run a kilometer in maybe 10 minutes. It was very long. Now my youngest is three years old and my oldest is five years old, and now I run five kilometers in 25 minutes on a good day. It seems like I am dramatically fast, because I only achieved that this year. All of a sudden, it seems like I'm dramatically fast, but for a long period, I felt like no matter how much I ran, no matter how much I tried to set goals for myself, I couldn't get any faster. I got stuck at that eight minutes per kilometer mark for a very long time. It was just like, why God? And sometimes I would stop. Sometimes I would set challenges for myself. I was like, I'm going to run 100 kilometers this month, and the people who followed me on Instagram for a really long time will know I failed at that goal four, five, six months at a time. I achieved it one time. It was magical, but there was generally just a lot of disappointment. And then all of a sudden this year, I've run 100 kilometers every month for the past couple of months. I am faster than I've ever been. I haven't done anything dramatically different. All I did was continue running consistently. At some point, I gave up on the speed story. I gave up on getting stronger. I was just like, you know what? I'm just going to keep running and see what happens. Funny enough, it seems to have had a real physical impact on me this year in terms of strength, in terms of muscle tone, and in terms of just running skill. So after the valley of disappointment, then comes the breakthrough, but you have to get through the valley of disappointment. When you finally break through the plateau, James Clear says that people will call it overnight success, but in truth, there is nothing overnight about it. By the time you see hydrated skin, you must know that water has been drunk for at least three weeks. Change can take years before it happens all at once, is one of my favorite quotes from the book. Outcomes grow like a tree from a mustard seed, tiny and then slowly, slowly build up. And you would never think, looking at that tiny seed, that one day it could dramatically become the size of a mustard tree. So here are the problems that James Clear seeks to address with his approach, right? Popular culture's hyper-focus on goals is problematic, according to him. It's problematic because goals are a result of a system or processes that lead to those results. You can't achieve the goal without the system, but the system will achieve the goal even if the goal is not named. This is a very important distinction. I can decide that I want to run, and then I will put a system in place of atomic habits that will take me to that goal, and I will achieve the goal. But if I put a system of atomic habits that points in the general direction of fitness, even if I don't say what that goal is, I'll still achieve it. But a goal set without the system cannot be achieved, and that is why he thinks atomic habits are the fundamental building block of any success towards any goal. You see, the challenges to him with being entirely goal-focused are this. Problem number one, winners and losers have the exact same goal. Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal, but they are not all decorating their walls with them like Michael Phelps did. Why is that? Because Michael Phelps, people studied him because of the number of medals that he's won, has a particular system that works very effectively to drive him towards his desired goal. He has atomic habits including exactly what he does, what time he puts on his kit, what temperature his body is at when he gets into that water. All of that is geared towards achieving the goal, whereas a lot of other people do not. I can't remember if I read this in the book or not. I think I heard it. I read it in another book, but it supports what James Clare is saying. I'm starting to get excited, and so I'm starting to speak faster. I'm going to slow myself down. I'm going to slow myself down. The most iconic tennis players in a study were found to have one thing in common that other tennis players did not. In that moment where the ball has been returned or it's gone out of play and they have to restart the game, they are quite deliberate about walking slowly back to the baseline, lowering their heart rate and then restarting the match, whereas other players just continue playing and ultimately the elite players beat them by fitness and by having conserved their energy better than the less experienced players, or rather the less elite players. This just goes to show that the habits that a person implements in attempting to achieve the goal can have a dramatic difference over time or over the course of a game in achieving an outcome. Problem number two that is achieved by using a system as your primary guiding light rather than a goal is achieving a goal is a momentary change. Once I achieve that 100 kilometers per month, then what? And a lot of people become deflated after they've achieved that. So if I clean the clutter from my room, it's probably a better example, if I clean the clutter from my room, and please note, this doesn't stop me from falling into this trap every week, but the system that produces that clutter remains. What happens? The clutter returns again and again and again. Just think back to the number of times you've aimed for a goal, perhaps even achieved it, and yet gone on to fall off the wagon after. It's because that goal has not been based on a fundamental change of the system that takes you to that goal. As long as the system hasn't changed, the results that you get will always be temporary or you will not get the desired results. The third problem addressed is that goals restrict happiness. A lot of people wait until they've achieved a goal or live in waiting until they've achieved a goal to feel happy and successful. If you really truly think about it, it's sad because your life doesn't pause for you to figure this out. You have to figure out how to be happy while you are in the process. You have to figure out how to be happy while you are aiming for your goal, because when you achieve that goal, it will be but for a moment. You have to find joy in the process, and the goal-oriented approach that our society and our culture pushes at this moment takes away our ability to find joy in the process that leads us to the outcome. And when you find joy in the process, your joy is sustained over a longer period because life is truly the journey. Number four, goals are at odds with long-term progress. If the idea is to grow and get better over time, then what happens when you achieve the goal? Do you stop growing? What do you do then? And with these ideas, and this is not very far into the book, James lays down a very compelling case for atomic habits and the great impact they can have on your ability to not only achieve remarkable results, but to also enjoy the process and to achieve success in working towards those results. What I particularly love about it is how practical and sustainable it is, because anyone who is raising kids, is trying to have a job, is trying to be successful in their job, is trying to have a successful career, trying to have successful relationships, understands what it means and why it is so important to not overburden yourself with dramatic things that take a dramatic amount of time that you must throw yourself into and be consumed by in order to achieve a result. All of these things need to co-exist and you need to be succeeding in all of these arenas. And I love that you can take James Clear's concept and apply it to any area of your life, parenting, to your personal relationships, to your friendships, to your career, to your knowledge and growth of your knowledge skillset, to your knowledge and the growth of your skillset, to your performance as a partner. All of this can be done with 1% changes, with atomic habits, with this kind of sustainable growth. Now, the rest of the book goes on to deal with the practicalities of building these habits, things like decision fatigue because a lot of us don't realize that we actually wake up with a finite amount of willpower on a day-to-day basis and we waste it on little decisions that don't matter. When we could take away the friction of having to make those little decisions in advance by automating things and leaving the willpower, which is finite, that we get on a daily basis to deal with the big things that we can't anticipate, all the big things that we anticipate and to drive us towards keeping our atomic habits in place so that we can drive ourselves towards the goal, but we would enjoy the process in the meantime. I hope you've enjoyed this book as much as I've enjoyed talking about it and I hope that you find time to read the book and to consider what it can do for you. If not, then that at least it gives you some food for thought, that goals are great. I mean, we all know that we want to fly the plane to LAX, but the map, the direction of the nose, the wind, all of these things matter in getting there. Thank you for joining me and if this episode has made at least one person out there one percent better, then my purpose is complete, my purpose is fulfilled and I'm eternally grateful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please share it with at least one person, like, share, comment, give a rating. The podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you very much for listening. you