Tom Facchine – Atomic Habits- Why Most Quit Early
AI: Summary ©
The speakers discuss the benefits of "Thearning Habits" by James Clear, emphasizing the importance of achieving instant receipt of change and avoiding negative behavior. They stress the need to continuously improve and not quit habits. The speakers also mention the " valley of Annual potential" associated with success and emphasize the importance of setting goals and learning a language. The speakers emphasize the importance of systems and habits in achieving long-term progress and emphasize the importance of setting goals as a key to achieving success.
AI: Summary ©
What is one habit that you want to
start and one habit that you want to
stop?
Let's think about it right now.
We are starting a new book, Atomic Habits
by James Clear, and we're selecting the book
because I think that it's particularly useful for
Muslims, and I think that it particularly gives
voice to many things that are already in
Islam, that are already Islamic values.
And from the things that aren't strictly Islamic
values, many of them are maslaha mursala.
These things are, it's not issue of haram
and halal.
It's just about benefiting from certain techniques.
So chapter one, he gives an illustration of
a melting ice cube.
Think about it.
Think about it.
Picture in your head a melting ice cube.
Okay.
Now, what is he saying about the melting
ice cube?
He says that imagine that we have an
ice cube on our table here, and it
is 29 degrees Fahrenheit.
The ice cube is not melting yet.
Okay.
You turn the heat up one degree.
So in Fahrenheit, it's now 30.
In Celsius or centigrade, it's now negative two
instead of negative three.
The ice still isn't melting.
All right.
We're going to turn the heat up another
degree.
Now it's 31 degrees Fahrenheit, or now it's
negative one degree centigrade or Celsius.
The ice still isn't melting.
This is not the time that we should
quit trying to melt the ice.
But this is where most people stop and
quit their habits.
That they don't see the ice melting.
And therefore they assume that all their work
is for nothing.
And then they drop off their habit.
But in reality, if you were to keep
going just one degree more to 32 degrees
Fahrenheit or zero degrees Celsius, then the ice
would start melting.
So just because you don't see results doesn't
mean that you're not actually contributing to eventual
success.
And most people turn back because they don't
see success fast enough.
One of the lessons from this illustration is
the author's point about how habits work, or
even better, how change works.
Okay.
How does change work?
How does improvement works?
Improvement works 1% at a time.
Unfortunately, most of us, we think about just
about where we want to be, which is
not bad.
We want to set goals.
We want to think about where we want
to be after.
And we only think that we have to
put in a ton of effort all at
once.
And then we get discouraged and we quit.
Okay.
So getting truly better is not about putting
in a ton of effort in one day.
It's not.
It is about only getting 1% better
every day.
If you were to raise the temperature just
1% every hour, eventually you're going to
melt the ice cube.
If you were to improve, whether it's Quran,
whether it's not eating sweets, whether it's your
diet, whether it's exercise, whether it's emotional stuff,
whatever, if you were to improve just by
1% every day, then you would very,
very soon be very, very close to your
goals.
This is called the valley of latent potential.
So the blue, check out the blue line
on the graph here.
The blue line is how people think that
change works.
People assume that they're going to continue to
see progress every day.
And that's why they quit their habits because
they don't see progress every day.
They put in work.
Let's say it's the gym.
You want to do pushups.
You want to do stuff like that, right?
That you expect to see progress.
But in reality, you see the opposite.
What's the first day feel like after you
go to the gym?
What's the first day feel like after you
go for a run or after you play
basketball or do some exercise or you're tired,
you're sore, you're spent, you're exhausted, you feel
horrible.
Right.
And so, and so you actually dip your
actual progress takes a hit initially.
But if you continue to persist, you will
actually not only catch up with where you
thought you would be, but you would actually
exceed it.
You would actually go past what you anticipated.
So they call this the valley of latent
potential.
All of this is your potential is building
up.
You got to imagine that you're cocking a
gun or that you're pulling back a bow,
that everything that you do, you're putting effort,
effort, effort, effort, effort in, and you haven't
seen the results yet.
Now, this is where it meets up with
the Dean because Islam is a faith and
a religion that gets us to think about
delayed gratitude.
It's not about instant gratification.
We want instant gratification.
And so we expect change to happen right
away.
No, that's not the way it happens.
We suffer, we suffer up front, and then
it pays off later, both in the afterlife
and with our habits.
If you were to get 1% better
every day, I think, what did he say?
You like 37% better after a very
short amount of time, it grows exponentially.
Whereas if you were to go 1%
worse every day, you would very quickly be
close to zero.
Our second point is that if you want
better results, then you should forget about your
goals.
And I love this.
Forget about your goals if you want to
make real progress and you want to build
habits.
Now, this was shocking to me because I'm
like you.
I'm used to thinking about, oh, the first
thing I want to do is I want
to sit down and write out what are
my goals.
I want to memorize 10 juz.
I want to read 17 books.
I want to learn this language, right?
That's what we're taught when it comes to
improvement, the first set goals.
But the author zigs while everybody else zags.
He says, if you really want better results,
then forget about setting goals.
Focus instead on your systems, on your systems.
He says, it's the systems that produce results,
not your goals.
Your goals do not produce results right in
and of themselves.
So he brings up four points to justify
this point.
Number one, he said, winners and losers have
the same goals, right?
You've never, you go to a loser and
to somebody say, well, you know, uh, you
know, I guess I never made any goals.
You go up to an Olympic runner and
they run the race and the guy that
came in last place, you go up to
the guy in last place, you say, what
was the difference?
Like, you know, he's never going to say,
well, I didn't make any goals.
No, he had the same goals as the
guy who finished number one.
And yet those goals didn't actually produce the
results that he wanted.
So it's not necessarily about goals.
Winners and losers have the same goals.
Number two, he says, even if you achieve
a goal, it's just a momentary change.
It doesn't encapsulate what we're after, which is
really becoming a different person.
And he's going to talk about more in
that in the chapter on identity.
The third reason he says is that goals
actually restrict happiness.
That when you set your goal, you actually
also set your ceiling.
This is something that Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam
actually indicated.
He heard a man or overheard a man
making dua to Allah to give him just
a place in the doorway of Jannah.
And the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam told him,
don't limit your dua because Allah might give
you something way better than that.
And you think you're being humble, right?
And you're actually holding yourself back, right?
So goals are the same thing.
Goals can actually hold you back from meeting
your true potential, which might be way above
what your actual goal setting, you know, especially
if you're like me and you tend to
sort of like be very self-critical and
maybe have a low opinion of yourself.
Like you might be capable of much more
than you think.
And that's leading into reason number four, which
he says that goals are at odds with
long term progress, that goals really don't result
in long term progress.
In reality, you do not rise to the
level of your goals.
You fall to the level of your systems.
All right, great.
We're talking about systems.
What are we talking about systems?
He talks, the systems are your habits.
Your habits are the compound interest of self
-improvement that you're trying to get 1%
better every single day, right?
That this is what we're, that's why the
book is called Atomic Habits.
That's why he's having us first think about
habits and how we structure our day.
And this is a very Islamic principle because
in Islam, we are people of process or
people of process.
The prophet said, if the day of judgment
were to happen like right now, and you
had a sapling in your hand, you plant
the sapling because that's your process.
It's the right thing to do.
You do the right thing, no matter what,
no matter what the results are.
And when you surrender that over to Allah,
when you trust the process, you actually get
better results than if you had fixated on
results in the first place.