Atomic Habits Chapter 20: The downside of creating good habits

 The downside of creating good habits

However, the benefits of habits come at a cost. At first, each repetition develops fluency, speed, and skill. But then, as a habit becomes automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback. You fall into mindless repetition. It becomes easier to let mistakes slide. When you can do it "good enough" on autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better.

The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors. You assume you're getting better because you're gaining experience. In reality, you are merely reinforcing your current habits -- not improving them. In fact, some research has shown that once a skill has been mastered there is usually a slight decline in performance over time.

However, when you want to maximize your potential and achieve elite levels of performance, you need a more nuanced approach. You can't repeat the same things blindly and expect to become exceptional. Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.

Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery

Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development. Old tasks become easier the second time around, but it doesn't get easire overall because now you're pouring your energy into the next challenge. Each habit unlocks the next level of performance. It's an endless cycle. The solution? Establish a system for reflection and review.

Reflection and review is a process that allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time. Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement. Without reflection, we can make excuses, create rationalizations, and lie to ourselves. We have no process for determining whether we are performing better or worse compared to yesterday.

Improvement is not just about learning habits, it's also about fine-tuning them. Reflection and review ensures that you spend your time on the right things and make course corrections whenever necessary. You don't want to keep practicing a habit if it becomes ineffective.

James Clear's annual review:

1. What went well this year?

2. What didn't go so well this year?

3. What did I learn?

James Clear's intergrity report:

1. What are the core values that drive my life and work?

2. How am I living and working with integrity right now?

3. How can I set a higher standard in the future?

In the beginning, repating a habit is essential to build up evidence of your desired identity. As you latch on to that new identity, however, those same beliefs can hold you back from the next level of growth. When working against you, your identity creates a kind of "pride" that encourages you to deny your weak spots and prevents you from truly growing. This is one of the greatest downsides of building habits.

The more sacred an idea is to us -- that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity --- the more strongly we will defend it against criticism. You see this in every industry. The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.

One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. In the words of investor Paul Graham, "keep your identity small." The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you.

When you spend your whole life defining yourself in one way and that disappears, who are you now?

The following quote from the Tao Te Ching encapsulates the ideas perfectly:

Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail.

-- Lao Tzu

A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.

Saduran dari: Clear, James. 2018. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (Chapter 20).