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!
I use AI images to accompany roughly 18 to 19 out of 20 Daily-Ink posts. My general rule is that I’ll try one or two requests and pick from those. I don’t want to spend 10 or 15 minutes of my precious morning schedule to search for images, they are the side quest, my writing is the adventure.
However, it being the weekend, yesterday I had time to play… and yet I failed.
Here was my original request for my last blog post:
When that didn’t work, I got more and more detailed, even pausing the requests to ask Copilot (which uses DALL•E 3 to create images) if it knew what a waterpolo cap looked like. It described it perfectly… then I got it to reiterate my request before continuing. This is what I got:
But the caps still came out with helmet masks and at no point was the shooter facing the net. I finally gave up and cropped an image. Here is what I used, and then the full image:
Below are many of the fails. I recognize these are not common requests, and the images have some redeeming qualities, but there is still a way to go when it comes to AI text-to-image requests. So, when you see a less-than-perfect image added to my Daily-Ink posts, please recognize that I’m trying, but I’m not wasting time trying to get everything just right… I’d rather use that time to write, meditate, or exercise.
When you hear great athletes talk about practice, they know what it means to push themselves. When they miss a shot, lose an easy opportunity, they don’t give up, they don’t negative self-talk, they double down and give more than they thought they could. When they are in a game and everything is on the line… there’s one more offensive rush, one more play to decide the game, they are 100% present with a singular focus.
I’m not a natural athlete, and like I said before, “…sometimes I could get in the zone. Sometimes the game slowed down for me and I could see more action around me. Sometimes I could see the play forming and feel the rhythm of the game. I didn’t have a switch I could turn on, I didn’t know what I could do to put myself in the zone. I didn’t have control of it.”
I wasn’t an athlete that could choose to get into that zone, it found me. And it might not have found me enough, but I have strong memories of those moments, I remember them and how powerful they were. But they are all in the past… and I find that hard. I want those moments again.
Perhaps I need to start archery again? Maybe I just need a regular workout buddy? I don’t know what will get me back to that, being someone who no longer does organized sports? What I do know is that I miss it. This isn’t about regret, it’s like nostalgia, yet different. It’s a yearning to feel the push, to feel the relentless drive, to be a reliable force in the pursuit of excellence.
It’s about feeling the push in the present.
Lesson 3 asks three questions:
Developing good habits starts with obvious intentions. This works well as part of the 2 Minute Planning suggested in Lesson 2.
Atomic Habits Lesson 3 – Make It Obvious
Lesson 4 will be shared on Monday, I’ll be taking the weekends off from these 10 lessons because they are being introduced to Inquiry Hub students on 10 consecutive school days.
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.
