After a story that compares gamblers to calendars, the question is posed: “How will you track the progress of your habits?”
Atomic Habits Lesson 8 – Habit Tracking
And remember, the calendar doesn’t lie.
Lesson 7, ‘Rewards and Mistakes’, examines two ideas. First, what are positive versus negative rewards? And then, what do you do when you make a mistake?
Atomic Habits Lesson 7 – Rewards and Mistakes
Most people fall out of good habits after a mistake because they don’t have a plan…
If ‘oops’, then what?
We are about to pass the half-way point of these 10 lessons. I hope that you are finding them useful.
Lesson 6 examines how identity habits are much easier than motivation. If I believe that I am someone who regularly or always does something, that’s a lot easier than motivating myself, and trying to convince myself, that I should do that same thing.
Atomic Habits Lesson 6 – Make it Rewarding
Lesson 5 is about reducing friction and habit stacking. How do you decrease or eliminate things that make your habits hard to get started, and how do you stack your habits so that they become an automatic process once you get started?
Atomic Habits Lesson 5 – Make Habits Automatic
This is the first ‘Storytime’ in the series, where I share a personal story. I share my fitness routine to exemplify how I use this lesson to my full advantage. My morning routine is automatic, and so I only have to initiate one habit and then the entire habit stack just gets done.
Lesson 4 looks at designing and priming the location where you do your habits, so that the environment works for you.
Atomic Habits Lesson 4 – Place Based Routines
Reduce friction and distractions, do your 2 minute planning, and then get to it!
Creating Lesson 1 was a comedy of errors.
Version 1: I have Descript which adds captions, but I didn’t use it for my upload, despite knowing that I have a hearing impaired student at my school. That wouldn’t do.
Version 2: I added the captions, re-uploaded to YouTube, and only then noticed that the captions spelled James Clear’s last name as Clare. That wouldn’t do.
Version 3: I uploaded the 3rd version and noticed my cover title said ‘Identity based Goals’. The whole video is about Habits, not Goals. That wouldn’t do.
Version 4: Is live and good enough!
I’m going to focus more on just getting these done now, rather than changing minor imperfections. That said, I’m open to feedback.
Atomic Habits Lesson 2 – The Two Minute Rule.
This goes more specifically into Two Minute Planning. I’m not sure if this follows the true intention of James Clear’s two minute rule, but I think it works well for students to ritualize a good habit.
I’ve had this ‘in the works‘ for a very long time. Here is lesson one of ten:
Lesson 1, ‘Identity Based Habits‘, is the first of 10 Lessons based on James Clear’s book ‘Atomic Habits’. It was created by Principal David Truss for Inquiry Hub Secondary Students.
I will share all 10 lessons here over the coming weeks. Atomic Habits is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I wanted to share what I’ve learned with students at our school. These students get a lot more unstructured time than most high school students, and developing good habits about using that time well is something that can drastically improve a student’s effectiveness and output.
I hope to help guide our students to better productivity.
The Enneagram.
A shape that has been around for hundreds of years. It has esoteric significance and it has been used as a model for personality types for years.
But something is missing… and that’s the origin of this unique shape.
Not anymore. Joe Truss discovered, or rather uncovered, the following unique origin story of the Enneagram. Perhaps the Sufis of the past knew, but this knowledge was lost: The 2-Dimensional Enneagram has 3-Dimensional roots. Enjoy this short video to learn more: Secret Origins of the Enneagram.
“The Enneagram is a 3-Dimensional structure which manifests through the vertices of the icosahedron.” ~ Joseph Truss
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And if you think this is interesting, Joe has also uncovered the tetrahedral structure of our universe… if you know a physicist who can challenge these ideas, both Joe and I invite them to break this theory apart: We Live in a Tetraverse.
Please share with people whom you think might be interested.
Thank you.
I’m editing a video and I’m struggling to do it well in one place. I’m using Descript for most of my editing, but I wanted to put in a narrated slide show before the video and Descript wasn’t making the intricate edits I wanted without a major amount of effort. So, first I used Garage Band to edit the audio (after recording it on my iPhone). Then I used iMovie to put that together with the slide show (after making it in Powerpoint). Then I added the recorded slideshow into Descript.
I recognize my frustration is my own fault because I haven’t done these kind of thing in almost a year, and so now I barely remember the tips and tricks that used to come naturally to me. That said, I’m also frustrated because Garage Band and iMovie have had updates that put things in unfamiliar places for me. These updates seem to complicate rather than improve the user interface (UI). Meanwhile, the Descript UI seems improved, but it’s different enough from the last time I used it that I feel like I’m using it for the first time. Still, I could see myself eliminating the need for iMovie with the current Descript updates, so that’s one less tool I’ll use next time.
Most of my frustration is that I’ve spent over 15 hours doing about 5-6 hours worth of work. I spend so much time knowing what I want to do, and not knowing how, and then googling and watching YouTube videos that take 5-12 minutes to tell me 2 minutes worth of important information. I just want one tool to rule them all, and then I’m sure that I can get more done in less time.
After a 4 year hiatus, I’ve just published another podcast. Unfortunately, my link isn’t updating to my podcast hosting app or to Apple iTunes right now, and so the best place to listen is on my podcasting blog.
Description:
Join me on a trip in to Haliburton, Ontario, where Joseph Truss and I discuss the building blocks of the universe. This conversation assumes the conjecture that “We Live in a Tetraverse,” (the first video in a series called, “Book of Codes”). Watch this video first, to appreciate the premise of our conversation.
A conjecture is defined as: “an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information.” Joe is challenging the way Mathematicians and Physicists look at the universe today. Most perspectives put us in a three dimensional world based on three axis: X, Y, and Z. Joe says these are “necessary but not sufficient“, and that while we can do calculations based on this model of the universe, it will always require us to work with irrational numbers and rounding errors… but it’s all a question of resolution. Go deeper than the perspective of X,Y, Z and you encounter a universe built on triangles, or more specifically tetrahedrons. In a way, his premise is that working in a cube-based, X, Y, Z, universe is conjecture… it is working ‘on the basis of incomplete information.’
If we recognize that the smallest possible object in the universe (at the Planck length) is a tetrahedron and not a cube, (again see We Live in a Tetraverse to gain this insight), this doesn’t dismiss any calculations done in a cube universe, it simply allows greater resolution… and maybe eliminates the need to work with irrational numbers and rounding of decimals.
A simple metaphor for this would be moving from the imperial system of measurement to the metric system… measuring in millimetres instead of 16th’s of an inch.
Admittedly, this is a bit of a challenging conversation to follow, first because we start talking about waves as seen drawn in 2 dimensions on paper, and so the conversation is lacking some visual descriptions we discuss. 
Secondly because we have discussed these ideas at length previously, we are quite comfortable describing shapes and making connections that are not so easy to visualize when you haven’t had the same background conversations we’ve had. And yet, I felt the need to share this conversation, to bring to light some of the brilliant insights of Joseph Truss. One specific topic we discuss, that I haven’t seen anywhere else, is the idea that infinity is a fractal. The infinity conversation begins at 21:08 of the podcast and if you only listen to one segment, that’s the one to listen to. If you want to follow the full conversation, I’d suggest watching the video first.
Joe and I had walked down to a slow-moving river that adjoins his back yard. Joe, a musician as well as geometer, brought a drum with him and after playing a bit we started this conversation. I realized that this was worth recording and so I went back to to the house to get my phone. The podcast starts and ends with Joe playing the drums, and there is a drum interlude in the middle as well. So, pull up a seat next to us and enjoy this riverside conversation.
Show Notes: [Listen Now: Joseph Truss on Podcasting Pair-a-Dimes – Slower loading here than on my podcasting blog.]
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