Written by DJ Francis | 5 min read
Atomic habits spotlight
Have you ever wanted to take control of your life and be more productive? Books are a great way to gain the motivation to change and the inspiration to start new projects. Atomic Habits is a book written by someone who has gone through a lot from being at the top of the world to having to rebuild from the ground up. The author of Atomic Habits is James Clear. He had a fair shot at playing baseball at the collegiate level however was the victim of an unfortunate baseball accident that had him hospitalized for some time and recovering for a year. Instead of spiraling into an inescapable depression, he decided to do something about the state of his life. He adopted a mindset and lifestyle that takes the idea of mass improvement and shrinks it down to the atomic level because change takes small steps.
Your habits are the key to creating change. Most people try to make huge leaps cold turkey and fail but James Clear made tiny changes that were easy to maintain and build upon them. He uses the analogy of a plane taking off from California to New York. The pilot will have a straight trajectory however if he takes off just 3 degrees off course and doesn't fix it, it will lead to a big change. At first, it will not be noticeable but then when the flight is over instead of being in New York, the plane would land in Washington DC
Using this methodology, if you get 1% better each day, in a year you will be around 37 times better than you were when you started. Christine Kininmonth higlighted this in her article breaking quotes from Clear
I was recommended atomic habits by a friend who was trying to change the way they approached life. I read it and it changed the way I thought about the action I take in life. I wanted to be more productive and try to work on the hobbies I wanted for my mental health. I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a new perspective and wants to change something about them easily. Clear stresses the importance of creating small habits instead of focusing on big goals.
One of my favorite examples in the book is the ice cube example. Clear states that if you put an ice cube in a room at 0 degrees (below the freezing temperature), the ice cube will not melt right away. Doing a small habit every day is like heating the room in this analogy. You can do a lot of work to heat the room from 0 to 31 degrees and see no progress. This is however false because progress has been made and kinetically stored for that next degree. Most people quit after a while because they do not see progress when in reality, it takes time and you never know when you will see the progress. If we can adopt that approach with anything we do in life, it could help us as people living in a society.
Hey! Im DJ Francis
l always strive to create work that not only represents me as a designer but also me as a person. My goal is to solve problems in the real world through design and to make things more intuitive and easy to use through clean minimal design. This is just the beginning of my graphic design journey and I am excited to leave lasting impressions on the world!
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