A setback can inspire you to create habits
Today, as part of my New Year's resolution to improve my life, I started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. Chapter 1 is about an unfortunate accident the author went through on the baseball field. A baseball bat slipped out of a batter’s hands and hit him in the face, which resulted in a swollen brain, several broken bones, multiple seizures and a coma.
This injury set James back a on his baseball career, so when he recovered, he decided to make up for it by going to bed early each night, so he can start the day with energy to practice the next day. This habit encouraged him to start keeping his dorm room neat. Which gave him a sense of control of his life as well as increased confidence. This confidence spilled over to his studying habits and in the first year managed to get straight As. Something that was unimaginable before starting to build these habits.
He then started lifting weights on a regular basis and kept on building these habits. By his second year in college, he managed to get a starting position as a pitcher, the year after that, he became team captain.
By the end of his university career (6 years after getting hit in the face with a baseball bat) James was crowned the top male athlete at Denison University and named to the ESPN The Magazine Academic All-America® team.
He was also awarded The President’s medal, the highest academic honor.
Now, this story is about boasting on the achievements of James Clear; it’s about is giving an example of a regular human being fulfilling his potential by being consistent in making very small improvements.
Anything is possible with small habits and small victories, habits that can be applied to business and of course, your blogging career on HIVE.
Why tiny changes make a big difference
It’s easy to underestimate the value of making tiny improvements.
to achieve massive success, you must make earth shattering improvements, right?
Nah, that’s not how it works.
By setting the goal of improving yourself by 1%, which may not even be noticeable at first, you can actually reach incredibly significant improvements in the long run.
Here’s a short math exercise:
If you can improve something by 1% a day for a year, by the end of the year you will have improved a whopping 37x from where you started. Incredible, right?
This is because the effects of small habits not only accumulate, they compound over time.
remember this:
well, habits are the compound interest of self improvement
Writing this blog post, won’t make me a HIVE whale (it might not even earn me an upvote to be honest😄) But should that make be go back to my previous routine? No. The transformation is slow, but it pays off in the long run.
The same goes for bad habits too, by the way.
Choosing to eat a double cheese burger probably won’t make you gain weight that day, but if I always come up with excuses on how it's just one cheese burger, it's not the end of the world, You'll definitely notice in December.
Making a choice t 1% improvement or 1% decline in improvement might seem insignificant in the moment, but in the accumulation of all the moments throughout one’s lifetime, it can have a tremendous effect on your outcome.
So…
concern yourself with your current trajectory and not with your current results
If your goal is to build an audience to your blog but you only have one follower, don’t fret. Instead try to write a blog post every day of the week (which is what I’m doing right now) If you do this, you’re on the right path to achieving a successful blogging career even if it fees like you’re moving slower than you’d like.
Wow! I feel great already!
I read one chapter of this book and wrote one blog post about it.
I can certainly make a habit out of this :)
What about you? what are you reading today?