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OPINION
The power of 1 percent
Small, consistent habits and incremental improvements create sustainable long-term success and personal growth.
I absolutely love the start of a year – be it in January or the start of a new school year in September. I spend a lot of time and money finding the right planners, systems, and routines that will help me reach these goals, because once I have the right tools and checklists I cannot fail. And yet after a week or so, when that 5 a.m. alarm rings, I find myself hitting snooze on that workout and looking at more than 600 unread emails in my inbox. Is there a path from the person I am now to the person I want to be? Enter habits.
Janki DePalma, LEED AP, CPSM
Habits are in high fashion now, but they are nothing new. Habits are simply a standardized action that occurs after a cue. For example, I log on to my computer (cue) and check my email (habit). Or I enter the door (cue) and put my keys on the hook (habit). It’s almost automatic, but at one point I decided to do this. Atomic Habits by James Clear and other books have been talking about the power of habits to create incremental changes. After rereading Clear’s book, I truly understood why the word “atomic” in the title of that book refers to small (versus explosive) change. His mantra throughout the book is “we don’t rise to the level of goals, we fall to the level of our systems.” Can meaningful things happen with a 1 percent change? Short answer: yes.
Here are the takeaways from his book that have affected me the most: ■ First you establish a habit, then you optimize it. As a recovering perfectionist, I struggle with doing anything incorrectly. Turns out that a habit “counts” no matter how small or imperfect it is. For example, I want to establish the habit of writing thank you notes as a follow up for meetings. The perfectionist in me requires that each week I send out carefully crafted, multi- paragraphed notes to everyone I meet. That is a lofty goal with lots of room for failure since the task itself requires a series of steps (thinking, then
See JANKI DEPALMA, page 8
THE ZWEIG LETTER SEPTEMBER 16, 2024, ISSUE 1553
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