Chapter 4: Changing Bad habits and creating a habit scorecard

 Chapter 4: The Man Who Didn't Look Right 

So, here we are diving into the fourth chapter of the book. 
This chapter brings you all about the steps to be taken to build a habit. It talks about how habits work, and how your experiences are majorly responsible for your habits, which are basically involuntary actions resulting from repeated performance of those actions.

You all might have seen people diagnosing a certain disease without actual check-ups just having a look at your face. How is that even possible, some might wonder, but all of us know the answer: when we have been constantly doing things, we get such experts in the job that we can easily predict things without actually realizing that we predicted the right thing. 

Why? 

The human brain is a prediction machine. 

Whenever you experience something repeatedly, your brain begins noticing what is important, sorting through the details from the information surrounding, highlighting the relevant cues, and cataloging that information for future use. With enough practice, you pick up on the cues and predict the outcomes. 
Learning is happening all along the way, your brain encodes the lessons learned through experience, and your ability to notice the relevant cues in a given situation is the foundation for every habit you have. 

You are much more than your conscious self. 

You often underestimate how much your brain and the body is capable of doing.
You don't tell your brain that you're hungry right. Appetite and hunger are governed non-consciously. Cravings arise due to the hormones and chemicals secreted in the body, BOOOM! suddenly you are hungry, even when you think you are not. 

As you repeat these actions, they become involuntary enough, that you start performing the actions of autopilot. 
You don't need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin. You can notice an opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it. This is what makes habits useful. 

When is it, the habits become dangerous? 
As habits form, your actions become so automatic and fall under the non-conscious mind. You fall into old patterns before you realize what's happening unless someone points it out. The more you repeat these patterns, the less likely you will be to question what you're doing and why you're doing those. 
Hence, before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones. If a habit remains mindless, you can't expect yourself to improve it, less create a better habit. 

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" 
-Carl Jung 

The Habits Scorecard

 The process of Pointing-and-Calling:

The process of Ponting-and-Calling is a safety system followed by the Japanese Railway system that is designed to reduce mistakes by calling out the exact speed of the train when it pulls into a station or calling out all the details and naming them aloud. 
It is believed that this system reduces errors by up to 85% and cuts accidents by 30%. 

It raises the level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level. 

James asks you to do something similar with your everyday actions, by creating a habit scorecard. 
The more automatic the habit becomes, the less likely you are to consciously think about it. And when you've done something a thousand times, things are highly likely to get overlooked.

The exercise: 

Make a list of all your daily activities.
For example: 

Once you're done with the list, ask yourself, "Is this a good habit, bad habit, or a neutral habit" and add a '+', if it is good, a ' -' if bad habit, and a ' ='  if it is neutral. 

The list above might look like this: 

The marks will depend on your situation and your goals. 
The habits that have a positive outcome according to your situation, are good habits, bad habits will have a negative outcome which are not likely to benefit your situation. 

The first step for changing a bad habit is to have a lookout. Hearing bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem real. It adds weight to the action and prevents you from mindlessly slipping into your old habits. 

The goal of the Scorecard is to observe your habits, you don't need to change anything at first just go through your everyday activities, and if you are observing someone else, provide your own judgment towards it. 


Here's everything JAMES mentions in this chapter. 
Let's see what the next chapter keeps for us. 
Thank you!!