Motion vs. Action
I am fascinated by the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear. For years, I’ve been trying to professionalize my writing, or maybe not making it “professional”, but consistent. I’ve started many blogs. I’ve posted a few times. I’ve also done paper journaling, but every time it has been hard to build the habit. However, reading “Atomic Habits” has been a great eye-opener.
Why? James writes as clear as his last name. He explains a couple of things that made me think about mastering a skill and stop procrastinating. Both topics are not new and I’ve read MANY articles and MANY books related to these. This time, this way, it just clicked.
Idea 1. Motion vs. Action
He explains that sometimes we spend a bunch of time “planning” or “preparing”. For example, I want to write a journal consistently, so FIRST, i will get the perfect pen, and the perfect notebook… until then I won’t be able to put my words into paper. We convince ourselves that this is putting ourselves into MOTION. However, MOTION is not ACTION. We can spend our lives in motion, afraid of actually putting words on paper, which would be action. First one is our comfort zone, full of pretexts. Second one is putting ourselves out there, building practice and experience. This bring us to Idea 2.
Idea 2. The 2 minute rule
I’ve heard before that “if it takes 2 minutes or less it’s something that you should do right away”. I’ve also heard about “you just need to start” and that takes less than 2 minutes. The catchy point about this idea is that we can convince ourselves to give the least effort on things (just 2 minutes, just 1 page, short walk, etc.), but when we’re already at it, our brain can also tells us “yeah, ok, you already put 2 minutes, you might as well put 2 more”… and so on. Even if we keep the 2 minutes, 1 page and the short walk, the point is more about building the habit of “showing up”. JUST SHOW UP.
So, this is me showing up here for the first time.
In the following posts, I will elaborate on the main topics that I intend to write about here. Hopefully, my reflections, tools and experiences will help someone else around.
AR
