“You do no rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”

Goals require motivation, systems keep your habits on track… pushing you towards your goals, while relying on less motivation.

Atomic Habits Lesson 10 – Moving From 2 Minutes to Mastery

Well that concludes my 10 Lessons based on James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I highly encourage you to read the book. There are details I had to edit, like the importance of being 1% better, that James demonstrates clearly and entertainingly in the book.

I’m so glad to finally finish this for our students. I started talking about it a couple school years ago when I listened to Atomic Habits for the second time, taking notes on my whiteboard… Planning these 10 lessons along the way.

Then last year I spent about a 10 hour day laying out the updated whiteboard and recording myself sharing the 10 lessons. And I’ve spent much of my spare time over the past 2 and a half weeks doing video editing.

Our students in our school have more free time than most high schools get. And, from Grade 9 to Grade 12, we really see a progression in our students abilities to get (good) work done quickly and effectively. We see them heading to university and we know they won’t be dropping out because they couldn’t manage the workload.

I hope that my 10 lessons will help at least one of them take a smoother and more effective journey down that path.

A Shared identity is your identity, and your tribe can work together to build good habits.

Atomic Habits Lesson 9 – Find Your Tribe

https://youtu.be/V-HspKaeMpA

“You are the average of the 5 people you associate with most.” Quote via Tim Ferriss.

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!

Lesson 3 asks three questions:

• What you will do?
• When? And,
• Where?

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.