Action, not motion

> letting go of what holds me back

> disclaimer: everything written here is off the top of my head

Recently, I listened to https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

Atomic Habits is the most comprehensive and practical guide on how to create good habits, break bad ones, and get 1…

jamesclear.com

I think it’s a must read. The book starts off really intense. I thought it was gonna be a cheese-y self-help book full of clichés, but it was far from what I expected.

What really stuck with me about this book was:

1. little habits add to your latent potential and eventually lead to big results
2. it’s not the goals but the systems that separate the “winners” and “losers”
3. motion is just preparing and daydreaming, action is what actually makes you improve

In the past few weeks, I’ve been changing my environment and attitude towards life to focus on adding these small habits to my life to consistently improve in all aspects of my life.

• health (diet, fitness, mental)
• coding
• relationships (spouse, family, friends)
• fulfillment

So far, I’ve been waking up right as the sun rises at 5:50–6:00 AM naturally and have been going for a walk around the neighborhood for about 1 hour, listening to an audiobook on Audible. Starting my day with mindful listening and exercise has really calmed me down and allowed me to focus for the rest of the day.

On my walk, I’ve added a few small habits:

• do one pull up at the playground
• take a 15 second video of the mountains
• whenever the book really gets me thinking, write down what I’m thinking

I’ve been feeling really good lately. I feel like I’ve always been “thinking” about doing things and preparing for it and daydreaming about “doing” it. I think the only solution is to let go of that fear of failure and just go for it.

I’ll be documenting my journey here on Medium!

and

https://www.tiktok.com/@winnietoks?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

> below is a summary of what I remember in the book

In the book, James recounts a story about the British cycling team and described that their team was so terrible at cycling that there was a bicycle manufacturer that refused to sell racing cycles to the British team so that their name wouldn’t be associated with “losing”. The British cycling team hired a new coach whose philosophy was focused around the “aggregate of marginal gains”. This coach made the team focus on 1% improvements each and every day on small details like: determining the best muscle massage that produced the most healing, finding the best pillow so that the athletes could have better sleep and less pain, teaching the athletes to wash their hands appropriately so they would get sick less, figuring out the best lubricant for the chain on the racing cycles, and etc. All of these little details eventually added up and the same team that was once the black sheep of the cycling world became champions of the Tour de France for five consecutive years!

There was a photography teacher that separated his class into two.

One section was graded completely on quantity of photos taken during the semester.

The other section was graded completely on the quality of one single photo.

It was surprising but the section that was graded on the quantity of photos actually produced the “best” photos during the semester. He found that the students who were graded on quality ended up overthinking about taking the “perfect” single photo, and the students who were graded on quantity experimented and tried new things, which allowed them to stretch and grow.