I feel lucky to meet Atomic Habits when I really need it. While reading Power of Now, I discovered this book. Combining the notes from these two books helped me to have better life standards.
8 favorite life-changing quotes from Atomic Habits
Practical for daily life and in shorter time and helping you gain a new vision:
1. Relationships compound. People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others want to help you. Being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a network of broad and strong connections over time. Negative thoughts compound. The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way.
We should behave, people, as we wanted to be behaved by them. The book gives a nice example of it; the more people we help others, the more others will want to help us. Having a nice interaction with people will provide us better and wider connections overtime…
On the other hand, the negative way is going in the opposite direction. While we start to see other people as angry, unjust, or selfish, we see those kinds of people everywhere. This is called microaggression in the book which I think there is no better word to define it.
2. Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees. When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success.
While we try to achieve the goal, continuity is very critical. In time, we may think that there is no way to be successful and we may give up to continue. The uncertainty may cause discouraging. However, may be the big jump will come the next day. Aiming to break through the Plateau of Latent Potential is a great way to reach success.
3. It is a simple two-step process: 1. Decide the type of person you want to be. 2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
Determining the type of person you want to be and then trying to be like that with little accomplishments will help us to create the habits.
4. The more automatic a behavior becomes, the less likely we are to consciously think about it. And when we’ve done something a thousand times before, we begin to overlook things. We assume that the next time will be just like the last. We’re so used to doing what we’ve always done that we don’t stop to question whether it’s the right.
I believe that having awareness practices in daily life will improve our productivity. Actually, taking new actions in daily life may make you feel worried about the potential risks. However, there is also a positive side which can increase productivity.
5. If your space is limited, divide your room into activity zones: a chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table for eating. You can do the same with your digital spaces.
After attempting to create a habit, to create an early stable part, I got benefit from this technique. I even do this cafe for writing, music for washing dishes… 😉
6. No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Before long, an emergency will pop up—you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time. Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.
This quote reminds me of the number 2. Although the conditions may not allow us to realize the habits, it is better to try as possible as you can do.
7. One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress. A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit—like marking an X on a calendar. Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can make your habits satisfying by providing clear evidence of your progress.
Recording the progress encourages me to extend my limits. Moreover, in time, when I look back on my progress in a specific habit satisfies me and provides confidence to start another habit. For example, I regularly keep my exercise recordings in an excel sheet in a format that I can convert to graphs.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude the quotes and notes with my most favorite one. I even think about writing a blog post related to this post. Having more habits, hobbies, career paths will help you to have more confidence. If you have only one option and there is no proper conditions to do that option ( this can be any kind of your expertise area), you may be disappointed and it may reduce your productivity, even life-energy dramatically.
8. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself. For most of my young life, being an athlete was a major part of my identity. After my baseball career ended, I struggled to find myself. When you spend your whole life defining yourself in one way and that disappears, who are you now?
