For my first blog post here in quarantine, I have been tasked with reading a blog article from the legendary James Clear, (he is the one author who wrote Atomic Habits). I will be reading a random blog post of his (or one that stood out to me the most), and I will be reflecting on it.

While browsing James’ blog, I noticed that I really liked the layout of his website. I was wondering to myself if he designed his website himself, or if he payed a web designer or someone else to design it.

Anyways, I decided to reflect on his latest post for this blog post. I chose his April 30th post because I felt like the most recent post would be the most relevant to my life here in quarantine. His post was titled “The 80/20 Principle, mastery, and the importance of asking questions“.

I knew just by reading the title that this would be relevant to my life, mostly because of the fact that sometimes I don’t ask enough questions, and end up not knowing much about the topic at hand. Anyways, the main topic that James talked about in this post were his three main ideas. His first idea was about how not taking things personally is pretty much a superpower.

I connected to this a lot on a personal level. in my last year of elementary school I was not hanging out with the right people, they never made me feel good about myself and they never really paid attention to the fact that words can hurt. This ended up doing really well for me in the long run because I now find it really easy to not take things personally, especially when I am being insulted. Wether it be passively or aggressively. His second topic in his post was on ‘How to 80/20 your work’.

To be honest, by the title I had no clue as to what he would be talking about in this part so I was pretty much in the dark going giving my initial opinion on this topic. For this topic James wrote about how to basically filter out your most time consuming tasks of the day to figure out which ones are helpful and which ones are possibly not working.

Now, I didn’t make a list for this but I was able to do this pretty well in my head. The main things i’ve been doing the most during lockdown is making beats, playing video games, doing school work, and skateboarding. Now I think its pretty obvious which task out of those 4 might be negative to my day, so I decided to cut back on the video games and it has actually helped me.

James’ third and last topic in his post was about how the first mistake isn’t the problem, its actually the series or ‘spiral’ of mistakes that can follow.

He also said quote ‘The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you cannot do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it a all’. I definitely related to this on some levels. In the school sense I connected to this a small amount, but still in some ways. Sometimes when doing a project, I will lose a lot of my motivation if in the first hour of doing the project I find it difficult, and sometimes I think to myself; “Well I know for a fact that I am not going to be able to do this extraordinarily well, so what the point in wasting my time on it?” this is something that I will be coming back to in later PGP posts. In the end I found James’ latest post to be really relatable to my life, and it helped me see the bigger picture that I am not alone in my struggles. I really enjoyed making this post and I will keep you guys updated on my discoveries in the habit aspect of PGP very soon! Till next time.