Sticking With It

Ironically, despite being an author, I’m not the biggest book lover. I hopped onto the self help book bandwagon in the last year or two, but like a lot of markets in the modern world, it’s completely saturated. Every book claims to be the show-stopper, the one that will sort out our lives for good and pull us out of our seemingly never-ending rut. Thankfully, through the recommendations of friends, I have managed to stumble across a few gems, and one book stands head and shoulders above them all: 

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

I’m well aware that a lot of people despise reading. I hate to say that it’s possibly a dying art, given our diminishing attention span, so I’m not going to force anyone to read this book. In fact, a youtube summary might be sufficient in getting the major points across. I’m not going to delve into a summary of the entire book in this blog, but I want to shine a light on a common theme that is very apparent in this book, and several others such as “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. 

James Clear makes the point that any goal we may have in life – becoming an olympian, earning six figures, being in better health, becoming fluent in a language – the basis of all of these feats can be found in our everyday habits. It’s more a question of “how do I become this better version of myself” rather than thinking “how do I get to this milestone”. This is paraphrased by many successful individuals who echo the message “chase the person, not the thing”.

Let’s take an example – you want to take up running, and have goals to run 5k, 10k, a half marathon, and finally a full marathon. I myself, before reading this book, would have looked at this and said, “Ok, I want to run a marathon. So, first I need to get to a couple of miles, then I need to conquer a 5k, and so on”. This is a semi-correct approach. Yes, I have broken the task down into more bite sized components rather than choking on the final goal, but we can be far more granular than this. James Clear implies that, in the case of an aspiring runner, our focus should be on “living like a runner”. 

How can I sleep like an athlete?

How do marathon runners eat?

How much water do I need to drink?

How should I train?

How should I stretch?

The focus here is on the regularly occurring tasks, some take place every day (eating, sleeping), some might be 4 or 5 times a week (training, recovery days, etc.). The emphasis is moved away from the grand finale, and focused on the seemingly meaningless habits that we live by. 

It took me a while to get my head around this, but once it sank in, the elegance of this was fascinating. Any goal at all, be it financial growth, upskilling, increased performance, ability, fluency, can all be broken down into one simple question – “What can I do every day to become the person I want to be?”. Again, removing the emphasis from the “thing” or the “goal” and focusing on you. 

What do you need to do? 

What small decisions can you make every day to benefit this journey? 

The more I thought about this, the more it began to make sense. It began to weave in with areas seemingly unrelated to self-help, like business or sport. Both of these industries are a game of fine margins, finding an edge over one’s competitor. There’s a fascinating example in the book of an international cycling team who found minute improvements in every aspect of their race day prep and training routines, and these mounted up to shaving several seconds off their times – a huge improvement in racing terms. In the world of the stock market, the most successful day traders profit maybe 1% a week, if even, and maintain this profit margin over substantial time periods. We don’t need to find huge margins to be successful, we just need to find small ones, consistently.

I have seen this idea play out in my own life. When I was in college, my powerlifting journey was chaotic. My training regime was brilliant, but my progress was hindered by poor diet and regular alcohol consumption. I would make blinding progress for 8-12 weeks, and then mentally burn out, or I would begin to get joint pain from excessive load. When I left college, I took a more mature outlook towards my training. I focused on the long term, and on the lifestyle of being an athlete. Sleep became a higher priority, I gave alcohol a kiss goodbye, and I tightened up my nutrition. These consistent actions lead me to a version of myself stronger, leaner, healthier, and far mentally sharper than the athlete I was in college. I had traded intense blocks of hyper-improvement, for consistent smaller gains. Put simply, I had prioritised “becoming a better athlete” over “hitting certain milestones”.

So, the common denominator is probably the most unsexy term in the modern dictionary – consistency. A long term approach of small, consistent progressions is favoured over sporadic bursts of intensity and burn-out. So where does the graph come in? 

James Clear denotes an illustration similar to this as the “progress curve” in Atomic Habits. It depicts the idea that, when we begin to develop a new habit (try to become a better version of ourselves) we may see little to no change at first. We can go days, if not weeks, without seeing noticeable improvements. A fitness journey is a great example here. For the first four weeks, you are living the lifestyle, but you mightn’t notice a huge difference in how you feel or look (keep in mind that everyone is different in this case). But after eight weeks, the change is becoming more obvious. By the twelve week mark, you could be unrecognisable. Your clothes fit differently, you feel better, and friends may compliment and congratulate you on your new found lifestyle, but this pleasant experience isn’t possible without getting through the first few seemingly unfruitful weeks of the journey. As our habits become engrained, and our new lifestyles become second nature to us, progress can begin to soar.

So where’s the problem?

Most of us throw in the towel too quickly, and who can blame us? We live in a world of instant gratification, it’s no surprise that long, consistent journeys are unappealing to us. Many of us lose interest in our journey before significant improvement has the chance to arrive, and we follow the path of the red arrow below.

But look… look at the progress that we leave on the table. We have done the hard work, we have pushed our way through the unfruitful start, and are on track to seeing results, but our lack of faith in the process causes us to lose steam.

Therapy can be a great example of this exact problem. The first four, five, maybe even ten counselling sessions might feel pointless, but unbeknownst to ourselves we are peeling back the layers of the onion, and getting closer to the root of whatever is bothering us. I have seen this personally, in fact I swear by this. That “eleventh session”, when all hope is lost, that can be the one that delivers the breakthrough. That fifth week of eating better, when you desperately miss your old lifestyle, that can be the week when you begin to feel phenomenal. Consistency is the gateway to a version of ourselves that we never believed we could be.

To emphasise the effects of consistency, I have an exercise for you, to get you believing in the process.

Pick your favourite holiday destination.

Download Duolingo.

Begin learning the language of your chosen country.

Why do I recommend this? Because Duolingo does the number one thing that is required when trying to adopt a new habit – it incentivises and gamifies the process. You win rewards as you go along, you can see your progress building. If you spend ten minutes a day learning a language, you will see little improvement in a week, even in a month. But after six months, you will see changes. After a year, it will begin to feel second nature. After two years, you may well be fluent. I’m currently on a 50 day streak of learning French! So I will let you know in future blogs how the journey is going!

The moral of the story my friends, whatever you are doing, whatever you are trying to do, whatever version of yourself you are trying to become – stick with it. The breakthrough could be just around the corner,

Conor