Atomic Habits: Why Most Quit Early | Imam Tom Weekly

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Atomic Habits: Why Most Quit Early | Imam Tom Weekly

Are you quitting too soon on your goals without realizing how close you are to breakthrough? Join Imam Tom Facchine on Imam Tom Weekly as he breaks down how small daily changes lead to big results.

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This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings.

What is one habit that you want to start? And one habit that you want to stop? Let's think about it right now. We are starting a new book, Atomic Habits, by James Clear.

And we're selecting the book because we, I think that it's particularly useful for Muslims. And I think that it particularly gives voice to many things that are already in Islam. There are already Islamic values.

And from the things that aren't strictly Islamic values, many of them are maslaha mursala. These things are, it's not issue of haram and halal. It's just about benefiting from certain techniques.

So, chapter one, he gives an illustration of a melting ice cube. Think about it. Think about it. Picture in your head a melting ice cube. Okay. Now, what is he saying about the melting ice cube?

He says that imagine that we have an ice cube on our table here and it is 29 degrees Fahrenheit. The ice cube is not melting yet. Okay. You turn the heat up one degree. So in Fahrenheit, it's now 30.

In Celsius or centigrade, it's now negative two instead of negative three. The ice still isn't melting. All right, we're going to turn the heat up another degree. Now it's 31 degrees Fahrenheit or now it's negative one degree centigrade or

Celsius. The ice still isn't melting. This is not the time that we should quit trying to melt the ice. But this is where most people stop and quit their habits.

That they don't see the ice melting and therefore they assume that all their work is for nothing and then they drop off their habit.

But in reality, if you were to keep going just one degree more to 32 degrees Fahrenheit or zero degrees Celsius, then the ice would start melting.

So just because you don't see results doesn't mean that you're not actually contributing to eventual success. And most people turn back because they don't see success fast enough.

One of the lessons from this illustration is the author's point about how habits work or even better how change works. Okay, how does change work? How does improvement works?

Improvement works 1% at a time. Unfortunately, most of us, we think about just about where we want to be, which is not bad. We want to set goals. We want to think about where we want to be after.

And we only think that we have to put in a ton of effort all at once and then we get discouraged and we quit. Okay, so getting truly better is not about putting in a ton of effort in one day. It's not.

It is about only getting 1% better every day. If you were to raise the temperature just 1% every hour, eventually, you're going to melt the ice cube.

If you were to improve, whether it's Quran, whether it's not eating sweets, whether it's your diet, whether it's exercise, whether it's emotional stuff, whatever.

If you were to improve just by 1% every day, then you would very, very soon be very, very close to your goals.

This is called the Valley of latent potential. So the blue, check out the blue line on the graph here. The blue line is how people think that change works. People assume that they're going to continue to see progress every day.

And that's why they quit their habits because they don't see progress every day. They put in work. Let's say it's the gym. You want to do push-ups. You want to do stuff like that, right? That you expect to see progress. But in reality, you see the opposite.

What's the first day feel like after you go to the gym? What's the first day feel like after you go for a run or after you play basketball or do some exercise or you're tired, you're sore, you're spent,

you're exhausted, you feel horrible, right? And so, and so you actually dip your actual progress takes a hit initially.

But if you continue to persist, you will actually not only catch up with where you thought you would be, but you would actually exceed it. You would actually go past what you anticipated.

So they call this the Valley of latent potential. All of this is your potential is building up. You got to imagine that you're cocking a gun or that you're pulling back a bow that everything that you do, you're putting effort, effort, effort,

effort, effort in and you haven't seen the results yet. Now, this is where it meets up with the deen because Islam is a faith and a religion that gets us to think about delayed gratitude. It's not about instant gratification. We want instant gratification.

And so we expect change to happen right away. No, that's not the way it happens. We suffer, we suffer up front and then it pays off later both in the afterlife and with our habits. If you were to get 1% better every day, I think what did he say?

You look like 37% better after a very short amount of time. It grows exponentially. Whereas if you were to go 1% worse every day, you would very quickly be close to zero.

Our second point is that if you want better results, then you should forget about your goals. And I love this. Forget about your goals. If you want to make real progress and you want to build habits.

Now, this was shocking to me because I'm like you I'm used to thinking about. Oh, the first thing I want to do is I want to sit down and write out. What are my goals? I want to memorize 10 juz. I want to read 17 books. I want to learn this language, right?

That's what we're taught when it comes to improvement. The first set goals, but the author zigs while everybody else zags. He says, if you really want better results, then forget about setting goals.

Focus instead on your systems on your systems. He says it's the systems that produce results, not your goals. Your goals do not produce produce results right in and of themselves. So he brings up four points to justify this point. Number one.

He said winners and losers have the same goals, right? You've never you go to a loser and to somebody say, well, you know, you know, I guess I never made any goals. You go to an Olympic runner and they run the race and the guy that came in last place. You go up to the guy in last place.

You say what was the difference like, do you know is he's never going to say? Well, I didn't make any goals. No, he had the same goals as the guy who finished number one and yet those goals didn't actually produce the results that he wanted. So it's not necessarily about goals winners and losers have the same goals. Number two.

He says even if you achieve a goal, it's just a momentary change. It doesn't encapsulate what we're after which is really becoming a different person and he's going to talk about more in that in the chapter on identity.

The third reason he says that goals actually restrict happiness that when you set your goal, you actually also set your ceiling. This is something the Prophet ﷺ actually indicated.

He heard a man or overheard a man making du'a to Allah to give him just a place in the doorway of Jannah. And the Prophet ﷺ told him don't limit your du'a because Allah might give you something way better than that and

you think you're being humble, right? And you're actually holding yourself back, right? So goals are the same thing goals that can actually hold you back from meeting your true potential, which might be way above what your actual goal setting, you know, especially if you're like me and you tend to

sort of like be very self-critical and maybe have a low opinion of yourself. Like you might be capable of much more than you think and that's leading into reason number four, which he says that goals are at odds with

long-term progress that goals really don't result in long-term progress. In reality, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. All right, great. We're talking about systems. What are we talking about systems?

He talks the systems are your habits. Your habits are the compound interest of self-improvement that you're trying to get 1% better every single day. Right that this is what we're that's why the book is called atomic

habits. That's why he's having us first think about habits and how we structure our day. And this is a very Islamic principle because in Islam we are people of process or people of process.

The Prophet ﷺ said if the Day of Judgment were to happen like right now and you had a sapling in your hand you plant the sapling because that's your process. It's the right thing to do. You do the right thing no matter what no matter what the results are

and when you surrender that over to Allah when you trust the process, you actually get better results than if you had fixated on results in the first place.

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