Whether it’s new year’s resolutions or just becoming a better student, we tend to focus on the big picture when it comes to change. Radical changes to reach our goals feel grand and powerful but can often end up being very temporary or ineffective.The key to achieving meaningful and lasting progress may be in the accumulation of smaller adjustments.
Changing the trajectory of an airplane’s flight path by just 1% may seem insignificant but could mean that it ultimately lands in a completely different location. Perhaps the same rationale applies to our lives. Even 1% adjustments to our behaviour can transform us and alter the outcomes of our day to day lives.
James Clear (author) suggests that these 1% lead to progress as the successful small changes are learned and repeated to form an ‘atomic habits’ – healthy practices that help with reaching goals and overall growth. How do we put this into practice as students?One common goal is finishing the year with a better grade than the year before.Maybe it would help to take a closer look and find what little habits that could be changed in order to do this. If you never get around to researching lecture content that you didn’t understand, it could be time to start approaching lectures and asking for clarification right afterwards. If you have trouble with focusing in lectures, always bringing a bottle of water could fix this by boosting your concentration.
If trying out small changes seems to be doing some good, keep the changes as regular practices or‘atomic habits’. Continue to find new adjustments that help and before you know it, the 1% changes will stack up. Your trajectory will change without you even realising it, until you find yourself in a better place than where you started.
Here, James Clear talks more about the power of ‘atomic habits’:
