James Clear Talks about how to create positive outcomes through small changes of automatic behavior.
10 Things This Book Will Teach You
Learn how to…
- Build a system for getting 1% better every day.
- Break your bad habits and stick to good ones.
- Avoid the common mistakes most people make when changing habits.
- Overcome a lack of motivation and willpower.
- Develop a stronger identity and believe in yourself.
- Make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy).
- Design your environment to make success easier.
- Make tiny, easy changes that deliver big results.
- Get back on track when you get off course.
- And most importantly, how to put these ideas into practice in real life.
How to Apply Atomic Habits in Solar
“You do not rise to the level of your Goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”
My dad would always tell me, tell me what you’re doing and I’ll tell you where you’re going. I loved my dad for how he knew about the power of the law of harvest. He recognized that all the success he’d ever had was usually a lagging result of doing something good over time.
“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.”
Here’s an activity that will survey your current activity; ask yourself these questions and write your responses down:
- What is my “bare minimum” of baseline activity that I expect from myself everyday? What is my actual activity?
- What does a good/bad day look like for me? What is considered a bad day for me? What is considered a good day for me?
- What is the most rewarded parts of my job? What activities yield the biggest payoff? Which ones don’t? Why?
- What immediate rewards are you giving yourself as reinforcements that you’re doing the right things? (The most vital thing in getting a habit to stick is to feel successful when you put in the work. In reality, it takes time to get real results in Solar, so having small rewards along the way can be very impactful).
- Ideas for immediate rewards: Physical Activity and Health/Mood: Knocking doors is the reward for a going on a daily walk. Give yourself a $100 deposit into a vacation fund/savings account every day you knock the full hours.
- Social: Talking to people to make new friends is a reward for knocking doors
- Habit Stacking: In order to do something fun, require yourself to knock 6 hours each day. In order to check social media, check your ARCs first.
- Go get yourself a protein bowl after each day you show up for work.
Chapter 6: Motivation is Overrated, Environment Matters More
“Design your environment to make success easier.”
“Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes the cue.”
People Places Things
Kobe Bryant had his true Mamba fashion signature game face on for every game. Likewise, do you have a knocking warmup routine? What do you do to prepare your mind to knock doors? Do you have things (cues) around you that detract from that? Where do you get hung up at when you fail at completing your doors hit goals and tasks? What could you do to change the way you prepare better and knock out the pitfalls? Are you walking into your own trap ie failures?
Distance yourself from any one thing, including people, that does not move you to positive action. These negative stimuli are simply limited by the highly successful. You know who they are. You can increase the distance from people that have low vibration and/or trigger low results.
Distance yourself from triggers that keep you from leaving the house or getting out of your car. Does your smartphone add or take away from your positive action? Do you need to put limits on or stack habits on how much screen time or entertainment you allow? Some have found success in requiring a set amount of doors before they pull their phones out of pocket. Some have placed their service into airplane mode or turned cellular service off on social media platforms when only Wifi works to view these apps.
Distance and proximity of triggers and cues (made up of people, places, or things) can make or break your success.
Chapter 16: Habit Tracking
The benefits of recording your last action, creates a trigger to go get your next one. Research as show that those who track anything are all more successful than those that don’t track anything.
- The actual act of tracking keeps you honest to your own perception of how much work you put in every day.
- It is attractive because you see yourself being successful and that your are progressing. When you feel down and depressed, you don’t want to break the streak of progress.
- Feels Satisfying when you record your habit. It shows living proof that you are seeing results and seeing progress. This all creates shots of confidence.
Tracking your work can sometimes be harder than just doing the work. Tracking doesn’t have to be this difficult. Your credit card statement records your transactions, your fit bit tracks your heart rate, Canvass tracks your interactions. There are things that auto track and it’s important to get access to that information.
However, the things that require manual tracking should be the MOST important things you need to do consistently—tracking the amount of doors you hit per hour, for example, if you’re not in the habit of knocking your full hours everyday. I can relate to this. Try doing what helped me. I would write down on 1 side the hours and to the right in columns, I’d tally how many doors, quality pitches, and appointments set (my funnel). Try it for yourself and see if you can’t prove the system wrong.
81 Doors, 12 Quality Pitches, and 3 Solid Appointments for the day. Tracking the inputs will tell you how much money you make per door too! Try it, it’s actually really fun.
Order a Lead Tracker Book from Sales Support.
And If you break your habit, it’s ok. Too often, we fall into an ALL OR NOTHING mentality.
The bad days will come, but don’t be the type of person that puts up a “zero” on the day. The benefit of putting up something each day is having the compound effect go to work for you. The bad days by successful reps are short lived by quick rebounds, but their bad days still MAINTAIN the progress built instead of adding on top of it.
In the gym, even going to do 5 burpees, 2 push ups, 10 minutes of cardio will maintain the gains at the gym so that you don’t go negative any of the days.
In golf, the PGA Tour Pros have bad shots too, they just rebound from those quickly. Their bad shots are still better compared to the good shots by those not on Tour through a lifetime of practice.
We optimize what we measure. And we measure what we WANT to optimize.
Accountability Partner
“An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction. We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.”
Do you have someone that is there to help you stay on track? Who is your person that you answer to whom you respect and admire and don’t want to disappoint
“A habit contract can be used to add a social cost to any behavior. It makes the costs of violating your promises public and painful.”
These are fun to create as you go head-to-head with others who’s skill is similar to yours. I remember the Jamba Juice contract I had with my buddy my first summer selling alarms door-to-door. Th person with the most sales wins a daily Jamba on the way home, we stopped and the loser had to fork it over to the winner and it was super motivating to try to win and many days was the main driver for why I kept pushing. I became the top first year rep in my office in Moreno Valley California.
“Knowing that someone else is watching you can be a powerful motivator.”
I remember being in one of the biggest lime lights I was ever a part of back in 2016. I was competing for a Tesla Model S in a 2-month head-to-head double elimination tournament. It all came down to a week long show-down against some of the other top dogs in the company. I remember back when the tournament started telling those that I looked up to, “You will see my best self come out.”
I remember thinking about how difficult it would be. But if I told these important people I would be great, and if I wasn’t, that I’d be a quitter if I backed down from being my best self. I strived to be my best self every minute of every day.
I focused on each minute that way, and I went on to shatter my personal best to totaling 56 SRAs in that month.
I had people watching me.
I had highly respected and admirable people watching me who I didn’t want to let down.
I was measuring and tracking each minute.
I had become a bigger believer in myself through the process.
I had changed.
End.