Voting for who you want to become.

I am a fan of James Clear. He wrote a book about habits, Atomic Habits. I have read it probably three times since the covid lockdowns started two years ago. Being trapped at home, I wanted to develop the habits of highly effective people for myself. My motivation has been self-awareness; I wanted to do better because my life had become a fright. There is a saying; you can't help others if you don't help yourself first. Doing better by me was probably the best way to do right by my husband and friends. The whole trapped at home in lockdown. It allowed me to focus and practice the skill described in the book.

There is a story of a workman who pushed the same wheelbarrow of dirt back and forth all day, thinking he was getting away with cheating his boss out of work. It takes as much effort to do myself proud as it does to perform poorly. The Atomic habits book is full of the tiniest suggestions about making habits work for you by using the sleight of hand of a judo champion. He describes the advice to reduce your desired practice down to a procedure that takes less than two minutes.

While practicing the skills examined in the book, I realized that being half-assed about my life is a unique kind of punishment. Doing some tasks poorly or skipping a chore leads to more work and frustrations, while doing my best gets me out of bed, shaved, fed, and ready for work. For example, never losing my keys means I have to put them in the drawer as soon as I walk in the front door.   Always having dog poop bags means I take the lid off the empty bag holder and put it in my pocket while walking the dog. Then, when I get home, hang up the leash, and toss my keys in the drawer, there is the lid to remind me to refill the holder. There are many examples of doing the best I can with the same effort I previously used to be mediocre.

It has come down to making the hard things easy. I will cover making the easy stuff hard another time. Getting up early and running through a list of success-based new habits will not happen for me. I have no willpower, and I am too lazy to be motivated by anyone else's example. But getting up and turning on the shower before doing anything else is my mental equivalent to judo tossing my lethargic opponent, who would rather hang out in bed for an additional hour or three. My whole morning routine and the rest of my days' tasks are more successful because I have reduced my reluctance to do better down to one simple habit. I turn on the shower 1st thing every morning. Then, I get dressed, do my routine bathroom chores, and move on to walking the dog, making coffee for my husband, and so on through the rest of the day.

What I am reading this week.

I read a biography, Quantum Man, Richard Feynman's Life in Science | Lawrence M. Krauss. He put the sexy in physics on his way to modeling quantum mechanics.