Video 7 in our series on James Clear's book, Atomic Habits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYvp-ZS5FRg
Transcription
Make life better through repeating.
Hi, I'm Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.
I wanted to talk a little bit today again about, Atomic Habits by, James Clear, this is a part three where he's discussing, you know, in the process of making a habit, making good habits work and bad habits go away, you have to recognize that the third step is to make it easy.
This is deceptively simple but so important. If you look at anything that you do on a regular basis that you would call habitual, you'll have to say that you have created or something has allowed you to make it extremely easy to do. habits don't happen if they're not easy.
So it's a weird thing, it seems.
On one hand, it seems well, yeah, duh. But on the other hand, it really is true. I mean, what if you could just make a habit difficult if you're looking to get rid of it.
So that this comes back to a story that the first point that he makes in this in this part, in this section of the book?
I really like in fact, I really enjoy this story. I'm going to read it verbatim for you, I hope you don't mind. He says this is the beginning of chapter 11, which is titled walk slowly but never backward.
He says on the first day of class, Jerry Oldsman, I don't know how to say his name, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film, and photography students, into two groups.
Okay, everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained would be in the quantity group, they would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced.
On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student 100 photos would rate and 90 photos a B, add photos a C, and so on.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the quality group, they would be graded only on the excellence of their work, they would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but get an A.
In order to get an A that photo had to be nearly perfect. Okay, at the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group.
During the semester, these students were busy taking photos experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skill.
Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts, other than unverified theories, and one mediocre photo.
This is the truth no matter what you're talking about and it's something we discuss here. In fact, I have a whole chapter dedicated to it in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, all about being consistent.
Being consistent really is more than anything about being persistent. And you be sure and check out my book, when you get a chance, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you can go buy yourself a copy, or you can get a free copy, download one at AmazonProofBook.com.
Back, let's talk about atomic habits here. He says the famous Voltaire quote, the best is the enemy of good when you repeat something, when you have repetition behind it, you will automatically get better.
There's no way around it and so I discussed this in terms of content marketing.