So far today I have had at least 4 post topics I have started to compose in my mind. With each one, I was super excited. When I was busy doing other things, I felt the paragraphs forming in my mind. The arguments. The evidence. To conclusion.
They all sounded amazing – even if I do say so myself.
But when I got down to writing them. Poof! They’re gone.
As quick as those thoughts came they have now gone. Even the ones I had managed to jot down a few notes for no longer appeal to me anymore. I can’t return to that state anymore.
It is strange how we feel so invested, so convinced and so enthusiastic about an intention, just for it to disappear later the same day.
The State of Things.
It’s amazing just how quickly our moods can change our feelings towards something or someone. Two hours ago I was completely fine with this person, but now I just can’t stand them. Maybe I’m hangry? Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep. Maybe they actually are a jerk!
This changeability explains why so many of us fail to follow through with our good intentions. We tell ourselves. I will wake up early tomorrow and go for a run. But when the time comes we just don’t feel the same.
The problem is that our state has changed. We change from minute to minute and our future selves many not feel in line with what we are feeling right now.
Get In the Zone.
If we want to reap that benefits of our good habits then we must stick to them consistently. Therefore, we need to make sure our future self is consistent with our present self. Here’s a tip for doing this.
Use A Motivation Ritual
In James Clears amazing book, Atomic Habits he suggests using a motivation ritual to help us get in the right state for whatever we are trying to do. A motivation ritual is a few simple actions that you perform before any given habit. Think of them as small habits that help prepare for the bigger habit you are trying to build.
For example, If you trying to build the habit of writing. Before you sit down, clear your desk and make a cup of coffee (or any drink of your choice). Each time you do this you build an association and your brain starts to anticipate what is coming next.
If you want to start working out at home. Go and fill up a water bottle, grab your headphones and start playing some music to get you in the mood. Holding your water bottle and listened to your workout playlist will now be associated with working out.
You can often see these rituals in top performers to get them in a peak state. English Rugby star Johnny Wilkinson used to perform the same actions before every conversion kick; Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards used to eat a shepherds pie before a concert and Michael Jordan used to chalk his hands and then clap them together right in front of the people sitting behind the scorer’s table before a game. At first, these sound like superstitions. And maybe for some, there were. But the repeated association allowed them to return to a particular state for performing.
Bonus: A good tip is to make these small actions less than 2 mins, easy to do and rewarding, especially for habits you feel a strong resistance to starting. Notice I didn’t say for working out.’Change into your workout clothes’ because that doesn’t feel rewarding.
Conclusion.
Next time you are struggling to stick to a habit, begin it with a small rewarding motivation ritual to encourage you to follow through with your intentions.
Being able to write well is one of the most important skills. Whether its paper and ink or digital text, writing is still one of the best ways to communicate our ideas.
The trouble is I am not that good at it.
So I have set about trying to get better. The problem is that figuring out where to start has been a lot harder than I thought it would be. Prior to starting this blog, I knew nothing about writing or how to learn it.
However, here are 4 free tools I have found to be helpful. .
The Grammarly extension is a brilliant way to check for those spelling and grammar errors. Especially if, like me, you like to write your posts directly into WordPress. Writing directly in WordPress helps me reduce the friction in uploading.
This website helps you write more clearly and succinctly. Just write in the editor directly or copy and paste in your text. The webpage will highlight areas of your text that are too long, complex, use too many adverbs or the passive voice style. It’s a great way to get immediate feedback on your writing.
Whilst Yoast primarily focuses on improving the SEO (search engine optimisation) of your posts, it does have a nice readability feature. It tells you where how readable your post is and gives you suggestions to improve it.
Okay, this might seem obvious for anyone already writing online. But for those who aren’t writing publicly, this is one of the best ways to improve. This is because it forces you to clarify your ideas. In most instances, you’re trying to communicate to a stranger – so writing a blog helps you practice turning those ideas into comprehensible writing.
Over two decades ago a young Japanese man named Satoshi Tajiri, was inspired to make what would become a hugely successful cultural phenomenon.
Keep reading to find out what we can learn to from this example.
The Craze That Swept The World
Growing up in the 90s It was hard to miss an international cultural phenomenon that would still be around 25 years later. The franchise has spawned multiple video games, TV series, films, books and a very famous trading card game. Today it is the highest-grossing media of all time, earning a whopping estimated 98 billion dollars, trumping even that of Star Wars, another successful franchise that has been out nearly 20 years longer.
I am of course, talking of Pokémon.
For those people who have been living under a rock, Pokemon (a portmanteau of Pocket Monster) started its life as a Japanese Nintendo video game in 1996. In the game, the player collects small creatures called Pokemon, trains them to become stronger and battles them against other character’s Pokemon as a kind of sport. In the fictional universe in which they exist, there are special gyms to train Pokemon and even leagues and competitions. The franchise’s famous slogan ‘Gotta Catch Them All’ relates to players journey throughout the world trying to collect all the original 151 Pokemon to become the ultimate Pokemon champion.
What some people may not know is that the inspiration for Pokemon came from the creator’s, Satoshi Tajiri’s, childhood hobby of insect collecting.
As the story goes, Tajiri used to collect insects as a child in what was then, a more rural area of Tokyo. He even earned himself the nickname of Dr Bug. However, as Tokyo became increasingly urbanised, habitats for insects were lost and insect collecting became less accessible. When Tajiri came up with the idea for the video game Pokémon, he saw it as a way for others to experience the enjoyment of exploring and collecting, in the same way, he did with insects.
Combining Tajiri’s two passions: video games and insect collecting, may not have seemed like it would be an obvious success. Even at the time, executives at Nintendo did not really grasp the concept. But they were impressed by Tajiri’s programming skill, so they went along with it.
Finding inspiration in Non-obvious places
Oftentimes when we find ourselves at a creative dead end, we often look for inspiration in the same area of our work. If we write about productivity, we read productivity books and articles, we make videos about tech, we read tech reviews and watch tech videos. If we make video games, then we might copy the formats of other video games out there. However, we also have seemingly unrelated interests, that if we considered them, could offer a new angle or take on our work. In fact, that was the very nature of the article – I linked my knowledge of entomology, video games to offer a post about combining other interests to find inspiration. I am not actually offering anything new or groundbreaking here. Most people already know this. But I am using my uniques experiences to produce a blog post that combines the things I am interested in.
So next time you need some creative inspiration for your work, try looking at what your other interests could offer you.
In January I set myself the target of writing 1 blog every Sunday. I failed to hit that mark by 1, on the very last Sunday of the month. Even though I had done some thorough research on the idea for my post I couldn’t seem to follow through with it. I didn’t feel like I was ready to write it, I didn’t feel like it was good enough. I didn’t feel like I was getting any better.
As had become my habit of my last few posts, I left writing to the evening of the deadline. Forcing myself to stick to that deadline was the only thing that kept me uploading consistently. As I wrote at the beginning of this year, we need to start new habits by simply showing up’.
But at some point, we hit a stumbling block. We don’t feel like we’re progressing. We conclude ” I’m bad at this and I am not getting any better, so it’s a waste of time”.
And this is the point at which most people give up.
In this post, I want to discuss what we can do when we hit this pivotal point.
The reality is that simply showing up won’t make you better at what you are trying to do. However, it is crucial because it’s the baseline from which improvement is made. Trying to improve without showing up is like expecting to build muscle by reading about the best techniques but never going to the gym. On the other hand, only showing up is like, expecting to build muscle whilst only doing the bare minimum every time you go to gym. Neither alone will produce the result you want.
Showing up + Deliberate Practice = Improvement
As I said, in order to start a skill, we should build the habit of showing up first, but if we want improve on that skill, then we need to perform deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is different from regular practice. Regular practice is just repeating something over and over again mindlessly – usually without any useful feedback. Think of someone trying to learn guitar, but every practice session they just play the same scales, riffs, and songs that they’ve always done. They compound their mistakes and, even worse, they automatise the habit of this type of practice so it is a negative feedback loop.
Now contrast this to deliberate practice. A guitar player might isolate a particular area they are weak on, break it down and find ways to improve on it. They set out to practice it, evaluating the impact on their overall ability to play. They use feedback to test whether they are improving or not, maybe from themselves or maybe from a coach.
This leads of an obvious question? If we want to do deliberate practice, which parts should we focus on to begin with?
Focus on the Fundamentals
Obviously, it makes sense to start improving the most important areas first. The fundamentals. This is where coached/ guiding learning deviates from self directed learning.
Coached / Guided Learning
When we have a coach, or some syllabus to guide us, they can help direct our learning to focus on the fundamentals. What’s more, is that they can also give us immediate feedback. This is why basic tutorials can be super helpful when starting something new because they allow us to practice some of the fundamentals. The drawback of a coach/ tutorial is that by making these process easier, we don’t internalise our learning as effectively. As Sönke Ahrens puts it in ‘How to Take Smart Notes, p 88’:
“[Teachers] attempt to make learning easier for their students by prearranging information, sorting it into modules, categories and themes. By doing that, they achieve the opposite of what they intend to do. They make it harder for the student to learn because they set everything up for reviewing, taking away the opportunity to build meaningful connections.”
Therefore, if we are not careful this knowledge and skill can easily decay and be forgotten and all the time, effort and money we invested will be wasted.
Self-Directed Learning
For self-directed learners we have the opposite problem. Finding the focus of deliberate practice takes much more work, and oftentimes can lead to focusing on less important skills or even completely Irrelevant ones. However, when a self-directed learner does deliberately practise a fundamental skill, they get much more out it. Because it requires more work, they are more likely to remember it.
A Combined Approach.
An ideal approach is to try to combine both guided learning and self-directed learning. If we have a coach, then we should make sure we spend some time practising those fundamentals and expanding on them.
If a coach is not available, then we can research on the web or in books and look for repeatable themes that come up over and over again. These are likely to be related to the fundamentals of what we are trying to improve. In his book on rapid skill acquisition, the first 20 hours, author Josh Kaufman suggest:
For rapid skill acquisition, skimming is better than deep reading. By noticing ideas and tools that come up over and over again in different texts, you can trust the accuracy of the patterns you notice and prepare your practice accordingly.
Kaufman, Josh. The First 20 Hours (p. 29).
If In Doubt, Try A Short Experiment
Maybe we’ve skimmed some books and some articles, but we still can’t figure out where to start. Maybe we’re completely overwhelmed now. Maybe we feel even more lost than when we started. If that’s the case, we shouldn’t worry. Instead, we should try a short experiment. Here we can use our intuition as a barometer. We should pick something that we think might be important to what we want to learn. Then set aside some time each day to improve it. After a week we can review our experiment we can see if we have improved.
Back to My Blogging
There are many fundamentals that I need to work on in my writing, but the one I feel that I am struggling with the most is connecting my research with my ideas.
My current approach is to go through related books and underline a few paragraphs and then try to use them as the basis for my blog.
It might make sense to start with research first, but now I feel that I should develop my own ideas first.
If I start writing my idea first, I can then be reminded of the things I have researched. Then I decide whether they fit into my narrative. Plus, I can identify areas that are lacking and do some focused research and fill in the gaps – rather than trying to become an expert in the whole subject.
However, this is just a theory, so I am going to do a short experiment to see if it makes a difference.
My Challenge:A Blog A Day For 1 Week
Upload a blog post everyday, for 1 week. (3rd Feb – 9th Feb 2021)
Rough Plan:
Start writing first from Am to Noon
Edit in the Afternoon, limit to 4 O’clock.
Publish
Decide tomorrows subject.
Evening – research and take notes.
If you read these posts, please leave constructive feedback. I would really appreciate it.
I know that my writing skills are far from good right now, and I have a long way to go but I hope that using deliberate practice and showing up every week, I hope to get better.
Ok, so it’s time to come clean and admit what I am actually doing. Up until now I have been reluctant to share this because, well, it sounds so ridiculous! I have a mortgage, a wife and one-year-old daughter – and I had a good job… until I quit it. On top of that, I don’t have another job or a concrete plan – just a few ideas and some savings to keep us going for a little while.
I could waste time here explaining why I left my job, but I am not going to. There were good reasons I can assure you, but frankly, no one wants to read about my personal problems and the issues I had with my job. The sad fact is, most of us, for whatever reasons, want to leave our jobs so that we can pursue something more fulfilling. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity, so I took it… what’s the worst that can happen?
I have been toying with an idea for a while – a Blog/ YouTube channel where I document myself learning new skills and exploring new things it order to help me find my passion. However, I never managed to get any momentum. Of course, I gave myself all the usually excuses: not enough time, money, energy etc.
The truth was, that I was never fully committed . I tried to play it safe. To not take any risks. I was trying to juggle a career, whilst simultaneously trying to find a way out of it. I felt in constant conflict and it was massively draining. I felt that nothing was going to change and that I was stuck.
So I took the plunge and handed in my notice. All I can remember is such a feeling of immense relief , like all of a sudden felt a dark cloud of despair had be lifted. I felt empowered and that It was up to me to make my own choices, right or wrong , and to live with the consequences. As of the 17th January 2021 I officially left my job.
My Aim For 2021
So what do I hope to achieve? Here is a rough Idea I what I want out of this experiment .
To find ‘My Passion’ – or at least explore some of my interests.
To get healthy – physically and mentally. (Both of these took a massive hit last year).
Spend more quality time with my wife and daughter.
Give back to community and others.
To learn a bunch of new things. – some fun, some for employment.
Reassess my values.
Read more.
Share my journey
This list isn’t as specific as I’d like. I know it would be better to set specific goals and make a plan. However, being somewhat of a perfectionist planning can very easily turn into procrastination. This idea of “having a good plan” was one of the major things that was held me back in the first place. After a while I realised that I just needed to take a risk and let the things develop on their own – sometimes you got to just jump in.
Exploring Through Blogging.
For now, the rough plan is do a bit of initial exploration and see if anything sticks. This blog is one form of exploration.
It seems like everyone out there has a blog, so I thought I should probably have one too. As I wrote last week, just copying others may not actually get you where you want to go- but I have to start somewhere. Besides, I would love to have some documentation of this year to look back on.
I plan to upload a post every week covering what I have explored and found out that week.
My hope is that in time, this blog will not only get better, but that its content can help other people. At the very least, it will act as some tangible output of my journey.
My fear is that this may end up a cautionary tale for people not to take a big risk during a global pandemic – like quitting your job!
However, I should say that my previous fear was that nothing was ever going to change. That I would be too afraid to take a risk. That I would have to have the perfect plan or wait for the perfect time to make a change. But that is no longer the case. I guess things can change if you have the courage to act.
Whatever happens, things are different now. I have taken the first step. Wish me luck!
As I started the research for this article, I imagined I would be compiling a list of the common habits of some of the most successful people. Googling “habits of successful people” yielded the expected articles of the same nature: ’10 Habits of Successful People’, 33 Daily Habits Highly Successful People Have and even, 50 habits of Successful People.
I guess my expectation was to find those practices that most people have in common: Waking up at 4:30 every day, Meditation etc. – Emulate those habits and bam! I am on success street! Right? Well not quite.
The Trap I Fell In To
It’s not uncommon for us to copy the people we admire. People who have achieved great things, like: Winston Churchill, Bill Gates, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo Da Vinci. We want to know their secret ingredient. Their routines and their habits. After all Aristotle said:
You are what you do repeatedly – So your excellence isn’t an act, its habit’
Therefore, we get excited when we find out that Tim Cook gets up a 4:30am or that many famous people swear by daily mediation. Even that top CEOs read more than the average person. And of course, we should all be exercising and taking cold showers. That’s why videos with “I tried X’s routine for 30 days and It changed my life’ are so popular.
But as I read the lists of habits, I thought about my own successes and failures in trying to implement many of these into my life. I started to ask whether these were actually taking me in the direction I wanted?
The Deeper Reason We Fail
Whilst these practices can be important for living a better life and they can bring you positive results, oftentimes they don’t last. Importantly they don’t feel like they bring us closer to the success we were after in the first place – even when we maintain a good level of consistency. If we fall of the wagon, we tell ourselves that ” I need to work harder” or that “I need to be more consistent”. These are the reasons why I am not getting the success I wanted. ” I should stick at this for a least 2 years, even if it’s painful, I’ve got to have grit”.
The problem is we fail to look at the deeper reasons why things are not working.
When I first looked up the summaries for this book, I thought it was just another 7 habits to add my every growing daily habits to follow. But in the interest of doing thorough research, I decided to actually read the book. What most interested me was Coveys importance on developing habits that improve our ‘Character Ethic’ rather than our ‘Personality Ethic’, in order to live a successful and happy life.
Character Ethic involves cultivating habits that practice Integrity, Humility, Courage, Justice etc – in other words the way we want to see ourselves. Think of the virtues that Greek philosophers or figures like Benjamin Franklin tried to live by.
Whereas, the Personality Ethic focuses on improving your public image, the way you deal with people, your skills and techniques to get out of people what you want – essentially the way we want others to see us.
So many times, I find myself trying to portray some image of success by embodying the habits of successful people. But I never dig deeper and question whether these habits were in line with who I want to be – with my values and what I find important.
It’s not that these habits may necessarily bad, or completely out of line with my values – some are probably ones we should all follow. But the driving force behind them is superficial and weak. I don’t do them because of who I want to be, but because it’s what I expect out of a ‘successful person’. Even if I spend years finding ways to persist – because I recognise the importance of grit and consistency – I might find that I have been working extremely hard to achieve something I never truly wanted.
As Covey puts it:
It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busyness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”
Stephen R. Covey – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Finding Your Values
If you are like me, you may be unsure exactly what your values you are. Or you may in the process of re-evaluating them. If so, here are couple practical tips from the book:
1. Write you own Eulogy.
Describe what each of these people would say about us at our funeral: a close family member, close friend, work colleague and someone who is part of an of some organisation we attend.
We can then reflect on what we hypothetically wanted them to have said and whether those things match up. It gives us some Idea of how we wish to be seen by those closest to us, which often better match how we wish to see ourselves.
2. Write a Mission Statement
After identifying those things that are truly important to us, we can then put together a mission statement that both clarifies to us our values and also acts as a reminder. It can include things such as: plan tomorrows work today, never compromise with honesty, sharing food for friends and family is one the greatest ways to spend time, learn something new each day and give yourself time to recognise it. Don’t get busy to avoid doing the hard work.
Final Thoughts
So next time you start some new habit that apparently ‘every successful is doing’ – ask yourself are these actions and the results I want in line with what I value in life.
Behind the Blog
“In this section I discuss my own thoughts on how I wrote this blog. What I did well and why, what didn’t go so well and where think I can improve. It is mostly for me but let me know if you get value from it“.
What I thought went well?
Well, I have written another post, so that is a win. I discovered a great book, which is changed how I approach self-development. Also, I worked on the post throughout the week, researching and writing some of my first draft by Friday in time to upload it on Sunday.
What didn’t go so well
This post took much more time than I anticipated. Mostly because I got sucked into the research of reading the ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. Also, writing it took much more time because of I failed to organise my notes in an effective manner. I just highlighted text and then flicked through my highlights on my kindle. It was difficult to draw meaning from these and I had to back and re-read passages to gain some context. Lastly, I worked on it at random times.
What I will try to improve for next week?
Plan my research better. If it involves a book figure out a schedule to have it finished in time for a draft by Friday
Structure my book notes – Create an Evernote Notebook of book notes and give context to each note I write and how it applies to my post – it will save time later.
Schedule more regular slots for working on this blog.
Last week I talked about the importance of showing up. Just posting something every week to start to build the habit. That’s great and all but I am writing this post at the very last minute. I am showing up, but I haven’t put in the research and planning to produce a decent article.
But all is not lost. The very fact that I am evaluating the quality this post, and identifying the reasons for why It is bad, means that I have the chance to improve it.
It would have been very easy not to upload this week. To say to myself. ” I will do better next week”, and ” I will upload it once I have crafted a really decent article” But these excuses are vague. They don’t identify actions. I mean, what is doing better? presumably it means actually uploading a ‘good’ article. However, more importantly if I failed to upload this week, It would have been the start of a new habit of. ‘Not showing up’ – And that would have been in direct conflict to the habit I started last week.
This is why when starting a habit, no-shows are so much worse than just turning up and doing poorly. This is because it starts a habit in the opposite direction to the behaviour we are trying to cultivate.
A poor workout in the gym is better than no workout at all.
A bad blog post is better than failing to upload.
A poor video is still another video for your audience to watch.
In fact, I was go as far to say as that those days where you show up even is you do poorly are more important than the good days. This is because it breaks the notion that you have to always produce perfection, and that any thing less is not worth it. Nothing can be farther from the truth. If nothing else, a lesson can be learned.
So keep turning up and keep learning from the process and just maybe, something will grow out of it.
This is not the first blog post I wanted to upload in 2021. I wanted to write something of value, something well written and hopefully something great…. and I actually wanted to upload it on the 1st of January!
But this post is me showing up. It may not be the post I wanted but its a post nonetheless.
It’s not like I haven’t put the work in. I’ve done lots of reading and research. I have even written two well researched and unfinished drafts.
But all that researching, all that thinking started to pile on the pressure. I started to think “This first post has to be great. I need it to offer value to the reader. I need it to be well written – with no mistakes! It has to be as good as all those other blogs I read”
Yes… I was striving for perfection. And the overwhelm made the thought of writing any blog post not only daunting, but actually made it something I no longer wanted to do.
As Voltaire wrote:
The Best is the Enemy of the Good”
I’ve made this mistake so many times when I starting new things I’ve lost count. I want to be amazing right from the word go.
Instead I should:
Just start and accept that I will make mistakes;
Allow myself to be a beginner and accept I won’t be great Initially;
Know that practice improves you not only theory.
“But most of all I need to focus on showing up.“
Without showing up nothing can change. but don’t take my word for it. These two books are from Habit experts and they explain that consistent small efforts can compound over time. If you interested in starting a new project or habit this year, check out these two books:
This cup may look like any ordinary cup, but what if I told you this cup has mind control powers..
Ok, that sounds a bit out there, but it’s true. This cup has the ability to trigger a behaviour in me. Specifically the behaviour to drink water.
Every evening I would clean our kitchen counter and leave this cup out on the side. In the morning I would wake up, and like most people go down to the kitchen to make my morning cup of coffee. I would see this cup and think “oh yeah, thats my water cup – I will drink a cup of water whilst I’m making my coffee”
Change Your Environment. Change Your Behaviour
It’s seems an exaggeration to say that this cup changed my life, but it did have a profound effect on me. It made me realise the importance of cues or triggers in our environment. We all like to think we are in control of our behaviours but most of the time we are on autopilot. Our brains like to be in this state because it is energy efficient and produces predictable results. Our environments are filled with triggers for all sorts of behaviours, some of which we would like to stop.
When trying to start a new habit creating an obvious trigger is an important first step. I advise putting an object, to act as cue, in a prominent place where your will come across during your daily routine. It will help remind you to start/continue a habit. Secondly, if you use an object/ tool that is used to perform the habit (e.g. the cup in my case), then it makes the behaviour easier to do, and therefore more likely that you will do it. This is why I prefer an object, rather than a note reminding me to do the behaviour.
A couple of years later, I would discover that I was following the ‘1st & 3rd Laws of Behaviour Change’ from James Clear’s superb book ‘Atomic Habits’: 1. Make it Obvious and 3. Make it Easy. By doing both of these things I was triggering the new behaviour whilst simultaneously making it easier to do .
Examples:
Want to go for a run in the morning?
Place your running gear beside you bed for when you wake up.
Want to read more?
Place a book on your coffee table or your pillow.
Want to play less video games
Put away your games controller and games and console. *
*Note that this final example is the reverse of the rule. Remove the triggers of bad habits to make it less likely that you will do them.
Key to Success
The key to making this work is having a trigger item that is specific to the task. For example, I ONLY drink water from this cup. If I used it for coffee, fizzy drinks or alcohol it would create multiple cues and I would get confused over which behaviour to perform. I may end up getting drunk first thing in the morning… With the cup having one specific use, I don’t need to think, I just fill it with water and drink from it. I am using my brain’s auto-pilot wiring to my advantage. This is especially important when using locations as triggers. For example, if you associate your lounge with playing video games then it will be harder to start a habit of reading at that location. You will have to use a lot of will power to overcome the conflicting cues. Instead, pick the book up and go to a new location: the kitchen table, a chair by the window or even go to your favourite coffee shop. Soon these objects, locations and behaviours will become linked and performing your new habit will be automatic.
I hope you got value from this article. If you want to know more about habits I recommend checking out these:
