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Video 7 in our series on James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits.
Transcription
Make life better through repeating.
Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.
I wanted to talk a little bit today again about, Atomic Habits by, James Clear, this is a part three where he’s discussing, you know, in the process of making a habit, making good habits work and bad habits go away, you have to recognize that the third step is to make it easy.
This is deceptively simple but so important. If you look at anything that you do on a regular basis that you would call habitual, you’ll have to say that you have created or something has allowed you to make it extremely easy to do. habits don’t happen if they’re not easy.
So it’s a weird thing, it seems.
On one hand, it seems well, yeah, duh. But on the other hand, it really is true. I mean, what if you could just make a habit difficult if you’re looking to get rid of it.
So that this comes back to a story that the first point that he makes in this in this part, in this section of the book?
I really like in fact, I really enjoy this story. I’m going to read it verbatim for you, I hope you don’t mind. He says this is the beginning of chapter 11, which is titled walk slowly but never backward.
He says on the first day of class, Jerry Oldsman, I don’t know how to say his name, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film, and photography students, into two groups.
Okay, everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained would be in the quantity group, they would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced.
On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student 100 photos would rate and 90 photos a B, add photos a C, and so on.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the quality group, they would be graded only on the excellence of their work, they would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but get an A.
In order to get an A that photo had to be nearly perfect. Okay, at the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group.
During the semester, these students were busy taking photos experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skill.
Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts, other than unverified theories, and one mediocre photo.
This is the truth no matter what you’re talking about and it’s something we discuss here. In fact, I have a whole chapter dedicated to it in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, all about being consistent.
Being consistent really is more than anything about being persistent. And you be sure and check out my book, when you get a chance, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you can go buy yourself a copy, or you can get a free copy, download one at AmazonProofBook.com.
Back, let’s talk about atomic habits here. He says the famous Voltaire quote, the best is the enemy of good when you repeat something, when you have repetition behind it, you will automatically get better.
There’s no way around it and so I discussed this in terms of content marketing. Quite often I’ll talk about how you need to have lots of content marketing, and you got to put it out on a regular basis.
Even if nobody’s watching, listening or reading, it’s important for you to do because that repetition allows you to automatically get better. There’s no way around it you will get better with time.
He says here, that both common sense and scientific evidence agree repetition is a form of change. If you can just repeat something over and over again. You will get better at it.
This is a great way to be able to look at forming a new habit if you can form a new habit very small, grab something very small and do it on a regular basis. You will get better at that thing and better at that thing. It’s not about quality.
It’s about quantity and not quantity all at once. Quantity over time.
That’s how habits are made a lot of people that there’s been too Talk about, Well, how long does it take to form a habit?
And people say, Well, 21 days?
At some point, somebody came up with the number 21. It’s not necessarily true at all. It has to do with the type of habit it is how easy that habit is to do.
Yeah, how how well it fits the four parameters like he lays out in this book, and how often it is done?
Is that a habit that you’re building up once a week or once a month or is it a daily thing?
Or is it multiple times a day, the more often you do it, the quicker it will become?
A habit, the quicker it gets ingrained into your subconscious mind. So that was a great part of this. And it leads into the area of making it easy. And making things easy. Making things remarkably convenient, is the name of the game.
Here’s a great quote that he has a look at any behavior that fills up much of your life. And you’ll see that it can be performed with very low levels of motivation, habits, like scrolling on our phones, checking email, and watching television steal so much of our time, because they can be performed almost without effort.
They are remarkably convenient. This is really the he makes another point businesses and never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.
So this is one thing through business, we both hurt people and help people at the same time, depending on on whether they get caught up with whatever it is that we’re providing.
But in business, we’re always looking to deliver something faster, easier, simpler, and to make people’s lives easier.
This can hurt people in the long run if they get spoiled by having things delivered easily. But you can’t really get around it. Because one way or the other, certain parts of our life do need to get easier.
We just need to watch and make sure that our whole life doesn’t get too easy. Because that’s when you start, you start losing character. Something about life, we can’t have it too easy as humans.
Otherwise, we end up destroying ourselves but that’s a whole nother topic. But you have to realize that that’s the bad habits versus good habits, good habits tend to not be easy right up front.
But the more you can make it easier, the more you can make it a good habit, the more you can make your bad habits, inconvenient and not easy to do, the more you will automatically find yourself doing better things with your life. Which is a really cool idea. And it’s a simple idea.
This is very, very simple.
It’s just most of the time we don’t think of habits being the super convenient thing but they totally are.
That’s the real problem with the bad habit game. Yeah, I can go on and on. Amazing book, but a really an amazing section where he talks about part, the third law.
Tomorrow I’m going to talk about the fourth law. That’s the final law in this book. And I may cover some some other stuff on another day.
But I wanted to kind of finish up giving you a take on atomic habits once again, it’s not something I get paid for.
I haven’t been pushed by anybody to endorse this book. It’s coming purely from me and I think it will improve your life.
If it’s something that you’re interested in.
Go check it out. That’s all I have for tonight. We’ll be back tomorrow.
In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen. Hey, it’s easy.