It is about those tiny changes you make to improve your current state. You don’t have to take earth shaking changes to be able to achieve success. If you work on yourself and try to be better 1% everyday, then you will be 37.78 % better in the end of the year. On the other hand if you get 1% worse everyday, you end up being nearly 0.
Habits compound over time to yield a better life just like money compounds. Good habits that do not seem to have any naked result have high chances that we would avoid doing them and in between a bad habit will slip in. It is those tiny irrational decisions we take that multiplies over time and causes problem.
Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.
Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
A stonecutter hammering a stone for a hundred times and hardly finds a single crack in the stone but on the hundred and first blow with the same amount of force, the stone splits into half. See it’s not those efforts which don’t seem to have any changes worthless or you have somehow cracked a code after doing them, it’s the addition of all of them and after doing them, the results start showing and we think the last change did everything and the previous ones were waste of time.
A handful of problems arise when we focus on goals and not in system :
Winners and losers aim for the same goals but we don’t see what things separate them. Every company wants to be profitable, every Olympian wants to get gold but what separates the winners from losers is their focus. Winners focus on improving their system. Hence, Goals can not be what differentiate between a winner from loser.
If you make your mind to clean your messy room, you will be cleaning it but if you don’t work upon maintaining it, the room will get dirty again. The key is to focus on building a system that does not need a goal to motivate you for working. If you keep your room clean regularly, it will never get dirty.
Once you set goals and work towards achieving them, you create an ‘either-or’ situation; you either win and be happy about making it, or you fail and think you are not of any use. When you put happiness a milestone of achieving your goals, you end up being sad.
When you create a goal oriented mindset, you find your work boring after you achieve that goal. If you fall in love with the process, goals become just another milestone for you.
Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way. There are three layers where change happen
