Discipline is a fickle friend, or enemy. It comes and goes and seems to have a mind of its own. Atomic habits by James Clear is focusing not on discipline but forming habits around the things that are good for you, your health, lifestyle, and more importantly your goals in life. While also giving a framework for not only keep doing the good stuff, but also eradicating the bad stuff.
As we all know, or at least I know from experience, discipline and motivation can last you only so long. Running that 5k in 4 months will give you a goal, and inherent motivation. What it should be about is the joy of running and embedding running into your every day life.
How you form great habits and thus have a good enough chance to get to your goals is what this book is all about. The beauty is it’s focus on doing rather than planning, planning keeps you busy and doing moves you forward is a particularly nice sentence from the book.
As with anything you want to be good at, it starts by doing. thinking and planning is part of every project, but a lot of people keep planning and not doing.
Striving for perfection is not planning to perfection. You can think about all the steps needed for a ‘perfect‘ result, but only in doing you will achieve any result.
Consistency is the key in learning any new skill, or achieving any goal. So not obsessing over the goals in life and the end result we need to focus on the proces and the consistency. You will need time and work to get there.
One step at the time a lot of times gets you there, not just thinking about which steps you should take.
It ties in nicely with a lot of things I wondered about in my own projects. How do I learn from my day to day work rather than what are the steps I need to take. As they say in the military “no plan survives contact with the enemy” , but As (I think) Dwight D. Eisenhower said “plans are worthless, but planning is everything”.
So set a goal make a plan, it’s essential, and from that point on don’t overthink it. Do the work. It’s as easy as it is hard. This book will give you some great practical guidance for doing just that, the work.