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Our records are carefully stored and protected thus cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons. What is the name of the inheritance pattern in which both alleles are expressed equally? Give the phenotype of the offspring in the F1 generation.
What is the sequence of the nucleotides on its partner chain? Predict the phenotypic ratios of offspring when a homozygous white cow is crossed with a roan bull. Illustrate using a Punnett square.
In fruit flies, humans and other mammals, sex is determined by an X-Y system. However, many organisms do not have the X-Y system of sex determination. For example, birds have a Z-W system. Male birds are ZZ, whereas females are ZW. In chickens, barred feathers Z are dominant over nonbarred feathers Zb. Draw a Punnett square that shows the results of a cross between a barred female and a nonbarred male.
What is the probability that the offspring will be: i. Barred females? Nonbarred females? Barred males? Nonbarred males? Identify the components of the DNA nucleotide.
Using the following information mentioned, complete the following table. Biology 8th ed. Pearson Education, Inc. Rabago, L. Functional Biology: Modular Approach. Vibal Publishing House, Inc. Mader Essentials of Biology 2nd ed. Mcgraw Hill Companies, Inc. In Grade 9, you will explain the importance of biodiversity, find out how changes in the environment may affect species extinction and relate species extinction to the failure of populations of organisms to adapt to abrupt changes in the environment.
In any ecosystem, organisms need a balanced environment. A balanced ecosystem is one in which all living and nonliving things are interacting successfully. If any part of the ecosystem is disturbed, other parts will also be disturbed. What happens to a community when its species diversity is reduced? This module will help you find answers to these questions.
Make a multimedia presentation of a timeline of extinction of representative microorganisms, plants, and animals UNIT 1 Module 3 Suggested Time Allotment: 4 to 5 hrs These will help your teacher determine the knowledge you have for this topic.
Pre-Assessment: A. Photo Quiz: The words in the box are some of the causes of species extinction. Look at the pictures below and identify which cause of extinction matches each group of pictures. The map below shows the population distribution of fish, water bugs, frogs and water lily plants in a pond. Which species has the largest population in the community?
What factors might influence a change in the population? Changes to one part affect other parts. In this module you will study the various threats that are considered causes of the loss of biodiversity.
Study Figures 1 and 2. Picture yourself swimming and diving in Tubbataha Reef Marine Park, where very high densities of marine species are found. What organisms are in Figure 1? How many different kinds of organisms do you think you will see?
Now, imagine yourself standing in a coconut plantation. Which species do you think dominates this area? The Tubbataha Reef Marine Park has many populations. You can see hundreds of different species of organisms, whereas in a coconut plantation, only one species dominates.
A population is a group of living things within a certain area that are all of the same species. Several different populations may be found in a community. A population of one kind may affect a population of another kind within the community. A jungle has a greater amount of biological diversity, or biodiversity, than a cornfield.
Biodiversity refers to the variety of life in the area. In a jungle community, some populations, such as ants, fungi, and ferns, can be very large in number. Why do you think population sizes vary among organisms? Now work on the activity to find out the amount of biodiversity and species distribution in a community. Materials: Pen Paper Procedure: 1. This is an outdoor activity. Go to the area designated by your teacher.
Record the number of different species of trees present in the area. It is not necessary to know their names, just make sure that they differ by species. Record this number in your data table.
Go to the designated area again. This time, make a list of the trees by assigning each a number as you walk by it. Place an X under Tree 1 on your list.
If tree 2 is the same species as Tree 1, mark another X under Tree 1. Continue to mark an X under the trees as long as the species is the same as the previous one.
When a different species is observed, mark an O under that tree on your list. Continue to mark an O if the next tree is the same species as the previous. If the next tree is different, mark an X. Record in your data table: a. Runs are represented by a group of similar symbols in a row. The total number of trees counted. Calculate the Index of Diversity I. Compare how your tree I.
If humans were concerned about biological diversity, would it be best to have a low or high I. A change in population sizes may be due to factors affecting the environment. Why is it that populations do not increase without end? Look at Figure 3. This is an area in Calauit, Palawan, that is set aside as a park preserve, and no hunting is allowed in the park. A number of animals like giraffe and zebra are placed in the area.
There are plenty of plants to serve as food for the giraffe and zebra population. The herd of giraffe and zebra are assumed to be healthy and begin to multiply faster than expected. Predict what will happen if the giraffe and zebra population continues to increase in the park area.
You will work on the next activity to help you understand changes in population, factors affecting population growth and size, and learn about the needs and characteristics of a population. Figure 3 Park reserve in Calauit, Palawan On a sheet of paper, prepare a table to record the data for population density. Calculate the density of each population. Record it in the table. Guide Questions: Q 3. Compare the distribution patterns of the three populations.
Study the three patterns of population distribution in Figure 4. Using the given formula for computing population density, calculate the density of each population. Count the total number for each population.
Record the number in the table. Which population has the greatest density? Infer from recorded data from the possible causes for the differences in the population density. What conditions could change the density of any of the population.
When we consider the number of individuals per unit area, we are referring to the density of the population. Differences in population density in any community may be attributed to many factors. Population sizes change when new members move into the ecosystem. They decrease when members move out of an ecosystem. Anything that limits the size of a population like certain environmental conditions are called limiting factors.
Limiting factors keep a population from increasing in size and help balance an ecosystem. Examples of limiting factors are the availability of food, water, and living conditions. Light, temperature and soil nutrients are also limiting factors because they help determine the types of organisms that can live in an ecosystem. The maximum population size an environment can support is called its carrying capacity.
If the population size rises above the carrying capacity, organisms die because they cannot meet all their needs. How are limiting factors related to population density? They change with the number of births and when they move into an ecosystem. They also change when members die or move out of an ecosystem.
Animals can not exist without green plants. Living things create niches for other living things. But what happens if the living conditions of these organisms are not ideal for their survival?
What do you think are the major causes of species extinction? Work on the next activity which demonstrates the probable causes of species extinction. Create teams of seven members. Get your copy of the Extinction Simulation Data Table handout from your teacher.
Go to the area in the school grounds designated by your teacher. Using the flour draw out a circle measuring about 20 feet wide. In the circle, scatter toothpicks as randomly as possible. Record this information in the Extinction Simulation Data Table handout. Begin the activity. The Leader sees to it that the students perform their assigned task for the activity.
After the first round, put an additional toothpick grasshopper into the circle for every pair of toothpick grasshoppers remaining. This simulates reproduction. Rotate roles and repeat the activity a second time and record the data in the handout.
After the second round, rotate roles once again and repeat the activity for a third time and record the data in the handout. Draw a line or bar graph of the number of toothpick grasshoppers in the grass at the end of the round. Guide Questions: Q 9. What happened to the toothpick grasshoppers over time? In nature, what environmental factors might account for differences in the total number of grasshoppers? Suggest a method for testing your hypothesis in Q In the Philippines, some terrestrial species like the tamaraw in Mindoro, mouse deer in Palawan, Philippine deer, Monkey-eating eagle, and aquatic species like the dugong found in Negros, Batangas, and Leyte are in danger of extinction.
Sometimes, there is a particular species that declines so fast that it becomes endangered and is said to be threatened. In a study conducted by field biologists on population size and distribution of Philippine fauna, they reported that as of , 89 species of birds, 44 species of mammals, and eight species of reptiles are internationally recognized as threatened.
Source: cf. Functional Biology:Modular Approch. Changes to habitats can threaten organisms with extinction. As populations of people increase, the impact of their growth and development is altering the face of the Earth and pushing many other species to the brink of extinction.
You may have noticed that the natural vegetation in the area has been cleared. Concrete structures and increasing populations of people and other organisms gradually take over the area. Perhaps some areas were destroyed by natural disasters or by human activities.
Just as vegetation changes, animal populations also change. These may have major effects on the ecosystem causing replacement of communities or development of a new environment. The next part of the module is basically a discussion of local and global environmental issues that contributed to species extinction.
Imagine that you and your friends are being sent to explore two islands. The islands are very similar in size, age, and location. But one has human population and the other does not have. Predict what you will see in each island. Tabulate your predictions as shown below.
Island A Island B 1. What did you predict you will see in each island? How would you explain the differences that you will see in each island? Did you turn on an electric light, ride a tricycle or jeepney, or use a computer today? When you do any of these activities, you use one or more natural resources. Natural resources are materials in the environment that people use to carry on with their lives. But are you using these natural resources wisely?
Will the time come when these materials will no longer be available to you? You would probably have the same question in mind. Many of the changes that man has done to the environment were made by accident. If you examine your predictions in the activity, you probably listed them in the column meant for the island inhabited by human population.
Land would be cleared for housing and farming. These might decrease plant and animal populations, and some pollution and other environmental problems would result. Did you encounter the same problem in your community? Deforestation is one of the major causes of the disappearance of wildlife species. What happens to animal populations that are driven away from their natural habitat? If they cannot find enough space, many will die or become extinct.
Some species may become endangered, or in the verge of becoming extinct. In other cases, some animals may be threatened, referring to It happens when the concentration of organic nutrients that comes from domestic garbage and thrown in bodies of water, increases rapidly. Figure 10 shows the causes and stages of eutrophication in a lake.
Have you seen such an event in your area? This condition causes algal bloom and growth of aquatic plants. When the algae die, they sink to the bottom and the process of decomposition proceeds. This process uses up oxygen and as a result, aquatic animals die due to lack of oxygen. Bodies of water are also polluted with toxic wastes, untreated sewage, and fertilizer run-offs from farm lands.
One class of dangerous chemicals present in water is PCB polychlorinated biphenyl. PCBs are toxic wastes produced in the making of paints, inks and electrical insulators. Figure 11 shows what happens in the food chain when PCB is present. Figure 10 Eutrophication They are unable to excrete PCB from their bodies.
Through the process of biological magnification, the PCB becomes concentrated in the body tissues of water organisms. Biological magnification is the buildup of pollutants in organisms at higher trophic levels in a food chain. Fish living in contaminated ecosystems contain builtup high concentration of PCB as shown in Figure The fish were not killed by the chemicals, but they stored them in their tissues.
As the salmon feeds on the smaller fish, it took in the PCB in their bodies. Like the smaller fish, the salmon was not killed by the PCB. It stored the PCB in its tissues. Other pollutants found in water are heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and cadium.
These metals come from factories that dump their wastes into rivers or lakes. Pollutants can enter the air as gases, liquids, or solids. Cars burn fuel and produce harmful gases—carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons. Figure 12 shows the harmful pollutants present in the air. Figure 11 PCB dumped in lakes Please redraw has feeds. Total views 68, On Slideshare 0.
Six years after I had been hit in the face with a baseball bat, flown to the hospital, and placed into a coma, I was selected as the top male athlete at Denison University and named to the ESPN Academic All- America Team—an honor given to just thirty-three players across the country. By the time I graduated, I was listed in the school record books in eight different categories. To be honest, there was nothing legendary or historic about my athletic career.
I never ended up playing professionally. However, looking back on those years, I believe I accomplished something just as rare: I fulfilled my potential. And I believe the concepts in this book can help you fulfill your potential as well.
We all face challenges in life. But with better habits, anything is possible. Maybe there are people who can achieve incredible success overnight. It was a gradual evolution, a long series of small wins and tiny breakthroughs.
The only way I made progress—the only choice I had—was to start small. And I employed this same strategy a few years later when I started my own business and began working on this book.
For years, I had been keeping notes about my personal experiments with habits and I was finally ready to share some of them publicly. I began by publishing a new article every Monday and Thursday. Within a few months, this simple writing habit led to my first one thousand email subscribers, and by the end of that number had grown to more than thirty thousand people.
In , my email list expanded to over one hundred thousand subscribers, which made it one of the fastest-growing newsletters on the internet. I had felt like an impostor when I began writing two years earlier, but now I was becoming known as an expert on habits—a new label that excited me but also felt uncomfortable.
I had never considered myself a master of the topic, but rather someone who was experimenting alongside my readers. In , I reached two hundred thousand email subscribers and signed a book deal with Penguin Random House to begin writing the book you are reading now.
As my audience grew, so did my business opportunities. I was increasingly asked to speak at top companies about the science of habit formation, behavior change, and continuous improvement.
I found myself delivering keynote speeches at conferences in the United States and Europe. In , my articles began to appear regularly in major publications like Time, Entrepreneur, and Forbes. Incredibly, my writing was read by over eight million people that year. At the start of , I launched the Habits Academy, which became the premier training platform for organizations and individuals interested in building better habits in life and work.
In total, over ten thousand leaders, managers, coaches, and teachers have graduated from the Habits Academy, and my work with them has taught me an incredible amount about what it takes to make habits work in the real world. As I put the finishing touches on this book in , jamesclear. I had to rely on small habits to rebound from my injury, to get stronger in the gym, to perform at a high level on the field, to become a writer, to build a successful business, and simply to develop into a responsible adult.
In the pages that follow, I will share a step-by-step plan for building better habits—not for days or weeks, but for a lifetime. The fields I draw on—biology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and more—have been around for many years. What I offer you is a synthesis of the best ideas smart people figured out a long time ago as well as the most compelling discoveries scientists have made recently.
My contribution, I hope, is to find the ideas that matter most and connect them in a way that is highly actionable. Anything wise in these pages you should credit to the many experts who preceded me.
Anything foolish, assume it is my error. The backbone of this book is my four-step model of habits—cue, craving, response, and reward—and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps. Behavioral scientists like Skinner realized that if you offered the right reward or punishment, you could get people to act in a certain way.
Internal states—our moods and emotions—matter, too. In recent decades, scientists have begun to determine the connection between our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. This research will also be covered in these pages. In total, the framework I offer is an integrated model of the cognitive and behavioral sciences. I believe it is one of the first models of human behavior to accurately account for both the influence of external stimuli and internal emotions on our habits. While some of the language may be familiar, I am confident that the details—and the applications of the Four Laws of Behavior Change—will offer a new way to think about your habits.
Human behavior is always changing: situation to situation, moment to moment, second to second. The lasting principles you can rely on year after year. The ideas you can build a business around, build a family around, build a life around. The strategies I cover will be relevant to anyone looking for a step-by-step system for improvement, whether your goals center on health, money, productivity, relationships, or all of the above.
As long as human behavior is involved, this book will be your guide. The organization, which was the governing body for professional cycling in Great Britain, had recently hired Dave Brailsford as its new performance director. At the time, professional cyclists in Great Britain had endured nearly one hundred years of mediocrity. In years, no British cyclist had ever won the event. In fact, the performance of British riders had been so underwhelming that one of the top bike manufacturers in Europe refused to sell bikes to the team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw the Brits using their gear.
Brailsford had been hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. They redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip.
The team tested various fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and more aerodynamic. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1 percent improvements in overlooked and unexpected areas. They tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery. They hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold.
They even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.
As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated, the results came faster than anyone could have imagined. Just five years after Brailsford took over, the British Cycling team dominated the road and track cycling events at the Olympic Games in Beijing, where they won an astounding 60 percent of the gold medals available.
Four years later, when the Olympic Games came to London, the Brits raised the bar as they set nine Olympic records and seven world records. The next year, his teammate Chris Froome won the race, and he would go on to win again in , , and , giving the British team five Tour de France victories in six years. During the ten-year span from to , British cyclists won world championships and sixty-six Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured five Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful run in cycling history.
How does a team of previously ordinary athletes transform into world champions with tiny changes that, at first glance, would seem to make a modest difference at best? Why do small improvements accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can you replicate this approach in your own life? Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.
The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous routines. Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide. If you procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be time to finish it later. A single decision is easy to dismiss. But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet— but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success.
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. 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. Are you spending less than you earn each month? Are you making it into the gym each week?
Are you reading books and learning something new each day? Tiny battles like these are the ones that will define your future self. Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it.
Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy. Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up, which is why understanding the details is crucial. You need to know how habits work and how to design them to your liking, so you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade. Accomplishing one extra task is a small feat on any given day, but it counts for a lot over an entire career.
The effect of automating an old task or mastering a new skill can be even greater. The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas. Knowledge compounds. Furthermore, each book you read not only teaches you something new but also opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas.
It builds up, like compound interest. People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others want to help you. Being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a network of broad and strong connections over time. Negative Compounding Stress compounds. The frustration of a traffic jam. The weight of parenting responsibilities.
The worry of making ends meet. The strain of slightly high blood pressure. By themselves, these common causes of stress are manageable.
But when they persist for years, little stresses compound into serious health issues. Negative thoughts compound. The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way.
You get trapped in a thought loop. The same is true for how you think about others. Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those kind of people everywhere. Outrage compounds. Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely the result of a single event. Instead, a long series of microaggressions and daily aggravations slowly multiply until one event tips the scales and outrage spreads like wildfire. The room is cold and you can see your breath.
It is currently twenty- five degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up. Twenty-six degrees. The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you. Twenty-nine degrees.
Still, nothing has happened. Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a huge change. Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks.
Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment.
This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.
If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential.
Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at thirty-two degrees. When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it.
It is the human equivalent of geological pressure. Two tectonic plates can grind against one another for millions of years, the tension slowly building all the while. Then, one day, they rub each other once again, in the same fashion they have for ages, but this time the tension is too great.
An earthquake erupts. Change can take years—before it happens all at once. Mastery requires patience. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done.
However, this work was not wasted. It was simply being stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed. All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us.
And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time. But what determines whether we stick with a habit long enough to survive the Plateau of Latent Potential and break through to the other side? What is it that causes some people to slide into unwanted habits and enables others to enjoy the compounding effects of good ones? For many years, this was how I approached my habits, too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business.
I succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed. Goals are about the results you want to achieve.
Systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Your system is the way you recruit players, manage your assistant coaches, and conduct practice. Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.
Your system is how often you practice, how you break down and tackle difficult measures, and your method for receiving feedback from your instructor. Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?
I think you would. The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard.
The only way to actually win is to get better each day. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead. What do I mean by this? Are goals completely useless? Of course not. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems. Problem 1: Winners and losers have the same goals. Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias.
Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team.
The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome. Problem 2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change. Imagine you have a messy room and you set a goal to clean it. If you summon the energy to tidy up, then you will have a clean room—for now. You treated a symptom without addressing the cause. Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment.
We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level.
Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Problem 3: Goals restrict your happiness. For years, happiness was always something for my future self to enjoy. I promised myself that once I gained twenty pounds of muscle or after my business was featured in the New York Times, then I could finally relax. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness. This is misguided. It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out.
It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success. A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision. Problem 4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress. Many runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. The race is no longer there to motivate them.
When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits after accomplishing a goal. The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement.
Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress. The problem is your system. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Focusing on the overall system, rather than a single goal, is one of the core themes of this book. It is also one of the deeper meanings behind the word atomic. But atomic habits are not just any old habits, however small. They are little habits that are part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.
Habits are like the atoms of our lives. Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement. At first, these tiny routines seem insignificant, but soon they build on each other and fuel bigger wins that multiply to a degree that far outweighs the cost of their initial investment.
They are both small and mighty. This is the meaning of the phrase atomic habits—a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.
Chapter Summary Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run. They can work for you or against you, which is why understanding the details is essential. Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold.
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