Saturday, July 03, 2021
Habits lay the foundation of mastery. We are taught about good habits and bad habits in the early stage of our lives. But are there any downsides to good habits? Let’s try to answer this in today’s edition of The Passion Pad. This week I finished Atomic Habits by James Clear (Yes, finally!!), you can get an idea about what the book says by reading out it’s summary in thread of the week section.
In Chess, only after you know how each piece moves, you can learn about the new gambits and traps. Imagine playing chess without memorising how each piece moves. In every turn of yours, you will have to recall the movement of every piece and then decide whether to move it or not! Obviously if the piece movement doesn’t come naturally to you, you can’t win the game. Each chunk of information that is memorised opens up the space for more effortful thinking. This is true for all endeavours. For a basketball player, dribbling should come naturally. When you know the simple movements so well that you perform them without thinking, you can move on to the more advanced part which requires thinking.
However there’s nothing called as free lunch. The benefits of habit comes at a cost. Habits do help you in fluency, speed and skill. But at the same time habits push you into mindless repetition. It makes easier to let mistakes slide. When the habits become automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback. You assume you’re getting better because you’re gaining experience, but in reality you are reinforcing your current habit, not improving them.
The upside of habits is that you can do a task without thinking. The downside of habits is that you get used to do things in a certain way and ignore little errors.
If you want to maximise your potential you need a more nuanced approach. Blindly repeating the same things will not make you exceptional at your task. What you need is a combination of good habits and deliberate practice.
Obviously to achieve mastery, some things should be automatic. However a considerable time and effort should be spent on practice. Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalised the skill, and using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development.
Apart from LUCK, do you know what differentiates between a successful and an unsuccessful person?
Their ability to work in boredom. Another downside of a habit is boredom. We change our strategies, stop going to the gym, stop exercising because we get bored of the same routine. We think that a day off wouldn’t impact much. But this the differentiating factor. Even the successful people feel lost, out of passion, but their ability to go through the same process even when they are bored gives them the edge. It’s not the first mistake that takes you down, it is often a spiral of mistakes.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
P.S -> This is the 20th edition of The Passion Pad. Not an achievement, but yes, I can proudly say that I managed to pull it off during boredom.
See you next Saturday, until then have a great weekend :)
Cheers!
Some things that you may find interesting-
Movie of the week: The Pursuit of Happyness
Article: The making of Amazon Prime
Song I am listening to: Believer by Imagine Dragons
Quote I am enjoying: If it makes you smile, it’s worth a shot.
Thread of the week: Atomic Habits by James Clear
Here are the last three posts if you were too occupied to read them:
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