Habits are important. Even the small ones can make a big difference. Actually the smallest habits, or the Atomic Habits, are the most important habits, according to James Clear.
If you don’t know who James Clear is, he’s the guy who wrote Atomic Habits, the book that this project is based on.
The driving question for this project was:
How does balance within my life create opportunities?
I’ll have answered that question by the bottom of this post.
A few years ago, I never liked the self improvement type books, as I they all kind of seem the same, but all give different advice. They start out by telling you to “forget everything you know” and then give advice that rarely works. I liked this book, because this book was different. The book gives some very useful advice on how to make small changes to improve your habits. In the book there was a part about the importance of gradually working up to your goals, and that part I found very useful. My room has always been a mess because I’m always to lazy to clean it, and whenever I clean it, it gets dirty again within a few days. I decided to use some advice from the book, and instead of trying to always clean my room, I started by figuring out why my room kept getting so dirty. The main reason was clothes were basically everywhere. Then I had to figure out why that was happening, which was because my drawers were overflowing, and so then I decided to fix that problem. I started folding my clothes neatly before putting them into my drawer, instead of just dropping them in, and then with just that small habit I began to create, my drawer stopped overflowing, but there was still a growing pile of clothes cluttering the floor. This was due to me just leaving my dirty clothes out, instead of putting them into a basket. So then I started spending 10 more seconds every day to make sure I put my dirty clothes in the basket, and now with just 2 small habits, clothes stopped cluttering my room, and it began to stay neat after I cleaned it. I quite liked how they use analogies and stories to help make everything more understandable, and it makes the book more interesting and memorable. Although the book was longer then it could have been, it was packed with lot’s of useful information.
The book wasn’t the only way we were learning good habits. At school we began to do these daily activities where each day would have a theme. We did things like meditation, acts of kindness, exercise, optimistic journaling, and gratitude. I thought that the concept dedicating each day of the week to something was an interesting concept, so I decided to start doing something similar. On Mondays I would stretch in the morning and after school. I chose Monday to do this because I’m always sore from skiing on the weekends. On Tuesdays I have activities after school, so nothing then. On Wednesdays I would go up Seymour to practice snowboarding, but I’m gonna change that to biking soon, as Seymour is closing. Thursdays I would do nothing other then focus on my school work, and Fridays I wanted to use to hang out with people after school, but I couldn’t do that as we left for whistler shortly after school most days.
Another habit related topic is the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I made a post about the 7 Habits when we did a project about it last year.
It’s a book about 7 Habits and how they can help you out. Not to take credit away from James Clear, but the 7 Habits by Sean Covey was the book that changed my perspective on self improvement books. I really liked the 7 Habits project, and I found the 7 Habits to be very useful in my daily life. The only thing I didn’t like a lot about the 7 Habits was that it was a little difficult to start using the habits, but James Clear’s book helps a lot with fixing that issue. I’m not going to talk a lot about 7 Habits, although if you want to read more, I linked the post I made about it above.
Now for the last part, the driving question. How does balance within my life create opportunities? Making sure to have a good balance is very important, and if you have a good balance then life would be a lot less stressful, allowing for easier maintenance of the balance, and also there would be a lot more time to pursue hobbies and interests if a balance is maintained. A good balance would also allow for a wider range of opportunities from the employment standpoint, as you would be more productive and efficient, while being happier and more jovial in your work.
So that’s all for now folks, once again, thank you for taking the time to read my blog, and have an amazing day.