Geek's Guide to Getting Better

Becoming a better person one day at a time

recent posts

  • Review: Atomic Habits

    I have mentioned the book Atomic Habits by James Clear a few times. In fact, I think I have quoted it at least once in every single post so far. I recently completed another re-read of the book and thought it might be a good opportunity to explore the book, why I like it, and why you might want to give it a read yourself.

    I have read Atomic Habits more than 5 times now. I actually couldn’t tell you how many times, to be honest, though I know I am still in single digits. I come back to it time and time again, looking to the audiobook for advice, guidance, and new pearls of wisdom. I first read the book in 2020, and I credit it with a lot of the positive changes I have implemented in my life ever since.

    My plan in this post is not just to discuss the book, but to give you some insight into how it has resonated with me. I will try to give examples of how the ideas I have picked up from this.

    Takeaway 1: Systems over goals

    The first takeaway that has always resonated with me, is the idea that systems are more important with goals. Goals are fantastic to give vision, drive, and passion, but they actually won’t get you where you want to go alone. You can have the goal of running a marathon, but without the system of getting in the practice over months, you won’t get there.

    You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems

    This quote has been a guiding principle for me. Don’t get me wrong, I am not a complete package (that’s what this whole blog is about) but this quote resonates deeply with me. I have used this successfully in the past to make huge changes to my life. While some of those systems eventually crumbled and some of that work got undone, one area where I saw success is in my finances.

    I recognised that I had goals in 2020. I wanted to pay off my debt and take control of my finances. I had the goal, but I didn’t have the system. So I built one. I started tracking every single penny I earned and every single penny I spent. I have tracked every single transaction since June 2020 and I have not only paid off a huge chunk of debt, but I have got a healthy start to savings and I am able to actually enjoy my life in ways I never felt able to before when I felt like I was living paycheck to paycheck (spoiler: it wasn’t the pay that was the problem, it was my habits with the pay. That’s a blog post for the future).

    Takeaway 2: Change is about who you are, not what you do

    Int he book, James Clear talks about there being three levels of behaviour change:

    1. Outcome based
    2. Process based
    3. Identity based

    The first level is about goal setting. Building your idea of change on top of goals can work, but see takeaway 1 for more on that. The second level is about the processes and habits that drive your behaviour, this is key to real long-term change. The final level is the one that that matters most, identity change.

    Real change, long-term, ongoing, sustainable change is about changing the way you view yourself. You aren’t just a person who goes for a run, you are a runner. You aren’t just tracking your finances, you are a person who makes good financial decisions. Each action you take is a vote for the kind of person you want to be.

    For me, this is evidenced in the way I talk to myself. I no longer phrase things in a way that implies a change is temporary. For example, I recognised the need to cut dairy and eggs out of my diet at the moment. I am not being 100% consistent with that, but what I am doing is that I am calling myself vegan. I am not “trying to be vegan” I am not “trying to avoid eggs and dairy”. I am vegan. Who I am is changing, and how I talk about myself has changed to suit it.

    Takeaway 3: Your environment shapes your actions

    Human beings are very location based creatures. Our brains are hardwired to adapt to cues and changes in our environments and if we plan for it, this can be a great asset. If we don’t plan for it, it can be out downfall.

    Atomic Habits explores how you can design your environment to encourage the behaviour you want to to grow, and to discourage the behaviour you want to leave behind. Your environment also includes the people you surround yourself with. James Clear encourages joining a community where your desired behaviours are the normal behaviours.

    I have not yet fully implemented this, though in some small ways I have started. When I moved into my current flat, I made a point of not having a TV, or books, or anything mentally stimulating in my bedroom. I suffered with insomnia for a long time, but as soon as I adjusted my environment, change started to happen. It didn’t happen overnight, of course, it took a few months, but I now sleep soundly every single night.

    Takeaway 4: Tracking the rituals and never missing twice

    The book explores lots of different types of tracking, but most importantly it explores why tracking works. Human brains are simple, and simple brains get tricked easily. Seeing the “cumulative impact of marginal gains” over a long period of time is tough. The chimp brain we were all born with doesn’t easily conceptualise the long-term.

    Habit trackers are a great way of making that long-term visible. That might be an app on your phone, a calendar on the wall, or a page in your bullet journal, like I have started. The simple visual of seeing the progress add up over time, seeing the chain of successful completions, its a simple way to trick your brain into seeing the long term benefits in a tangible way, even when the goal isn’t visible yet.

    The key, at least for me, is to remind myself that change takes time and one missed day isn’t the end of the world. The book explores the idea of “never miss twice” as a way of allowing for those off-days, while having space for compassion and getting back on track without losing that momentum.

    Recommendation

    I mean, the recommendation is clear: I think you should go read the book. It’s one I have come back to many times, and I am sure I will come back to it many times again. I am always going to be striving to make changes, to improve, and to keep working on becoming the person I want to be. I know that James Clear will be part of that journey for me.

    In future posts, I will probably explore more of the ideas from this book, and specifically how I have brought some of the ideas off the pages and into my life. Hopefully it’ll be a success story.

    Have you read Atomic Habits? What stood out for you? If you haven’t read it, do you think you might?

  • Seasons of Change: 6-Week Sprints to Sustainable Growth

    Tomorrow I start again—new week, new me—and I will never skip a gym day, choose unhealthy food or oversleep. Never again.

    And in five days time when the pressure has become too much and I naturally fail (because I am only human after all) and after I have berated myself for failing (because I am only human after all) I will once again return to the precipice of “new” and dare to try again.

    Sound familiar? This is the perpetual cycle of self-sabotage I have been on for most, if not all, of my adult life. That desperate desire to improve myself, but the completely naïve belief that if this time I *really* mean it, then I’ll be able to make it happen. I have been back at this threshold so many times they put a plaque up commemorating me.

    The truth is, I do want to change. Obviously. I wouldn’t be writing a blog about getting better if I didn’t want to change, but I am also recognising more and more that I am likely a winner of the neurodiverse lottery that I hear so much about on social media. Now, I’m no medical professional, and I definitely don’t think anyone should seriously seek to self-diagnose themselves with anything based off a cursory scroll through TikTok and a thirty post streak of “if this sounds like you then you have brain squiggles” reels, but even I have to admit that time-blindness, racing thoughts, hyper-fixations, and an inability to commit to even a hobby for more than three days, are all a little outside of ordinary.

    This, at least according to me, is what brings me back to the threshold every time. I want to change, and in my adreneline and neuro-squiggly excitement for change, I over commit and tell myself how I am going to change everything overnight and that it’ll happen because I really really want it. If I believe hard enough, maybe I really can fly. And so the morning of “new day, new me” arrives and I leap from the threshold, arms spread, knowing that belief alone is the wind beneath my wings.

    And for a few days, it works. Pure willpower can topple the peaks from mountains and nothing can stand in my way, I am the bringer of change and all bad habits shall tremble and quake before me. I am forever changed and I will never return to the way I was before. And this is perfect and all the things I touch turn to gold.

    But forever is a long time. And wouldn’t it be great if I just took *one* day off because I have been amazingly good all week and today has been hard. One night won’t make all that much difference. But if I only have tonight, I should probably make the most out of it. Let’s really make sure we’re enjoying that one cheat night we’ve agreed to. Then the morning comes again and the consequences of my actions stare me in the face, burning brighter than the summer sun at 5.30am and I am pretty sure it’s not a sin to skip the gym as well.

    I’m back in the old habits and on the miserable climb back to the threshold, hoping when I get there the motivation will have resurfaced and I’ll be ready to go again, because next time I’ll definitely make it.

    There Has to Be Another Way

    Since stepping out into the big adult world in 2011, I have fallen into this loop again and again, and every time I manage to trick myself into thinking that this time it will be different, and I have finally come to realise it never is. The enthusiasm is a lie, the motivation is deceiving, and just like Icarus, my wings of willpower begin to smoulder before I even notice the heat. I have realised that I need to do things differently, that I need to adjust my thinking.

    I have already talked about the importance of systems, and how they are the backbone of everything we do. But changing systems is hard. The grooves in my brain that built these habits were laid over decades of bad choices and no amount of “really hoping for the best” is going to rub those marks out. It takes effort, it takes dedication, and it takes time.

    I recently watched a Ted Talk from Angela Lee Duckworth about the power of Grit. In it, she talked about how the success rate of high achieves in education was not determined by skill, by natural ability, by IQ, or any other measure, but by one thing. Grit. As she puts it: “Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”

    Endurance. That’s the word she kept coming back to, and that was what I was beginning to realise that I was missing. It wasn’t enough to decide on a change and simply to want it hard enough, it was about asking how I can develop the endurance to stick with things, especially on the days when I don’t feel like it.

    Now, this might sound like I am just excusing away a lack of discipline, but there’s real evidence to support this. Stage and Fedotov state in their paper ‘Anomalous cumulative inertia in human behaviour’:

    Human behaviour is dictated by past experiences via cumulative inertia (CI): the longer a certain behaviour has been going on, the less likely change becomes.

    That makes things sound hopeless. If I’ve spent the last 20 years avoiding good habits, it sounds impossible to make a change now, right?

    Wrong.

    Modern neuroscience has busted the myth that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. In the paper ‘Aging and brain plasticity’, Pauwels, Chalavi and Swinnen explore how there is “mounting evidence for lifelong brain plasticity”. You really can change your mind, and science proved it.

    None of this, however, is to say that it is easy. Yes neuroplasticity means that your brain is capable of learning new patterns of behaviour and forgetting old ones, but the cumulative inertia of old habits doesn’t go away on its own. It’s tough, and it takes time, and most of us have never had to learn how to unlearn the things we do.

    Seasons of Change

    After decades trapped in wasp-cycle routines, I decided it was time to force a season-by-season reset—so I devised my ‘Seasons of Change.’ I call it ‘Seasons of Change’, because like the seasons, they are long enough to settle in, but not too long that they overstay their welcome and I get stuck in a rut. Plus it sounds a little like the song from Rent and the musical theatre lover inside me couldn’t miss the opportunity.

    A season of change is a defined period of time where I commit to no more than three changes. Those changes can be as small or as big as I want, but they have to be contained enough that I can track them with a single measurement. I can’t have my change be “I am going to eat healthier” because that can’t be easily tracking with one measure. Should I measure my calories? My macros? The number of times I say no to a pasty?

    The period should be short enough to not feel like a burden, but long enough to let the behaviour have a chance to settle in. We aren’t looking for life-long adjustments, this is about trying new things to figure out what feels right. You need to give it space to breathe, but you also need to commit to putting it under the microscope in the future to see if it has any real benefit.

    For me, I am going with a 6 week season. It feels comfortable, achievable, and quick enough that even if I hate it, it’ll pass quickly enough. The season breaks down like this:

    • Choose 1-3 small, measurable changes.
    • Weeks 1 – 2: get your reps in. Focus on committing to every single completion. Celebrate every win.
    • Weeks 3 – 4: chart your growth. Start thinking about how this effort compounds into greater change over time, keep that long term focus now that the short term high is starting to fade.
    • Weeks 5 – 6: Start to reflect on how it feels. What is the biggest success? What is the biggest challenge? Can you pivot and get better outcomes?
    • Pick your next few small changes, keep the ones that worked, throw the rest out.

    It’s as simple as that. Simple, but not easy. I am anticipating the middle two weeks to be the hardest, as I get over the initial excitement and the wind begins to fall out from under me. I need to keep looking to that horizon to see where I’m trying to reach.

    Pitfalls I am Expecting

    If the last 6 weeks of doing this blog has taught me anything, it’s that you can never be too prepared for things to get tough. There are a couple of pitfalls I can foresee with the seasons model, but luckily for you and I, there are a few solutions to these as well:

    1. Too many things I want to change
      There are a huge number of things I want to change, how do I choose where to start? Try ranking them in order, maybe of importance, or ease, or excitement. It doesn’t really matter what metric you use, but just put them in an order. Then pick the first few from the top. There’s where you start. Keep adding to the list when you get more ideas, but only ever take a couple at a time.
    2. Perfectionism
      What if I miss a day? What if I get it wrong? What if it doesn’t stick? Then maybe the way you did it this time just isn’t for you. There’s more than one way to knit a scarf, in your next season try something different. Or move it to the bottom of your list and let the idea percolate a little while longer. This isn’t a race and there are no more points for coming first than coming last, the only thing that matters is that you keep jogging.
    3. Skipping the review
      This is the only one that is lethal to the system. If you don’t stop to notice the seasons change, before you know it you’ll be back in winter wondering where the summer went. Reflecting on the experience is vital, but it doesn’t need to be cumbersome. Five minutes thinking while you have a cup of coffee before work is enough, all you need is space to reflect on the season and how it has felt for you. To take the learning and to apply it and move on to the next one.

    The key to this whole thing is: intentionality. It’s about not feeling powerless in the journey of your life, and about choosing to ease up on the throttle a little, slow down, and really think about the direction you’re moving in.

    My current season is focused on two things:

    1. Intentional, focused movement for at least 20 minutes, 4 times a week.
    2. 90 minutes of “deep joy” a week

    That’s it. That’s the whole season. It’s small, it’s simply, but imagine where I’ll be in a years time if just these two habits stick. That’s a pretty powerful thought. Standing at the threshold of this six weeks, I’m not asking “will I fail again?”, I’m asking “what new wings will I build this season?”

    What are you going to do for your next season? Take some time and share in the comments what you are going to be focusing on, and how you plan to bring seasons of change into your life.

    And remember, as Philippa Perry said in ‘The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read’:

    If you’re not designing your life, someone else is designing it for you.

  • Bullet Journaling Badly: How Doing It Wrong Helped Me Get It Right

    I’ve spent the last month doing something that, honestly, surprises me. It’s not new or revolutionary to the world. But to me? It’s both. It’s something I have tried before and have never really gotten it to stick, but this time it seems to be working.

    Bullet journaling. Yeah, I know.

    I know, you don’t need to tell me. Every productivity and self-improvement blog on the internet has fifty posts about the bullet journal method, and this one isn’t going to tell you anything that the other, better bloggers can tell you. What I hope to tell you is a bit about why I think it is working for me this time around.

    What is a bullet journal?

    The Bullet Journal method, created by Ryder Carroll in 2013, started as a way for him to organise his chaotic life. It is a simple, minimalist approach to documenting what happens in our lives, reflect on what happened, and refine what we want to carry forward. There’s some great resources out there explaining how the method works, but I’ll try to cover it as best I can.

    A bullet journal has a few different types of pages within it. First are the “look ahead” spreads. There are a few types, but the key ones are yearly and monthly spreads—simple layouts that let you see what’s coming up so you can plan ahead. Typically you would start each period (year, or month) by creating one of these spreads.

    Next is the day-to-day management. These can be a weekly spread (which I do) or a full page-to-a-day where you can track every task, every event, every note which you want to document. There is a very simple way to keep on top of all of the different notes easily, using the key below:

    • Tasks are denoted with a bullet point
    x Completed tasks are denoted by crossing the bullet
    > Tasks that will be put in next month are migrated forward
    < Tasks that will be put somewhere else in the future are migrated back to the yearly spread
    • Cancelled tasks are struck-through
    – Notes are denoted with a dash
    ○ Events are denoted by a circle

    My key looks a little different, but that’s the gist.

    And that’s the whole system. It’s as easy as that, what could go wrong?

    What went wrong.

    I mentioned that I have tried bullet journaling before and that it didn’t stick, but there has to be a reason. For a long while, I thought it was just me. Something was fundamentally wrong with the combination of me and an analogue note-taking system. I thought that if it wasn’t digital, then it wouldn’t work. And for the few times I kept coming back around to the bullet journal, I kept bumping up against this wall. I would do great for a few weeks and then it would just fall apart.

    This time, as you might have guessed, has been different. So, I spent some time thinking about this and I realised one thing that I did differently this time compared to all the other times: I took the pressure off.

    The “cult” of BuJo

    I don’t think most people discover bullet journaling through Ryder Carroll. Like me, they find it through Instagram.

    There are hundreds of accounts on social media displaying gorgeous, artistic spreads with themes and colour. It’s clear that these people spend a few hours a week doing nothing but designing their monthly spreads. And while this isn’t necessarily a problem, the spreads are great and they are very pretty to look at, but the problem was: I started chasing those aesthetics. I wanted my bullet journal to look that good, and I pressured myself to design spreads for hours each week.

    I don’t necessarily think that the social media content in the bullet journal community is a bad thing, but it is easy to get caught up in the perfectionism and desire to spend more time designing your bullet journal than you actually spend using it. It’s something I want to discuss in a future post, but this need to constantly chase the perfect system typifies what I have come to think of as the “cult” of BuJo.

    (BuJo is the way the “cult” refers to bullet journaling. I, personally, hate how that sounds).

    So what’s different this time?

    The main difference this time is that I started small. The first month, I just tracked to-do items, I had no spreads, no planning ahead. I just got into the habit of writing my notes directly into the book. Some days were only a few lines, some were a page and a half. I kept it basic—a list of dates and somewhere to jot down key things to remember. I stuck to using it almost every weekday through April. I didn’t get much use at weekends, but I wasn’t too bothered by that.

    This month, I went a little step further. I designed a minimalist monthly spread, somewhere to jot down the key details, important events, reminders, etc. I also put in a habit tracker, and somewhere to track my sleep, mood, and stress. During the month, I have been doing a simplified weekly spread. The first week was set up in columns, which was a little cramped, and this week I am working in rows instead which feels more comfortable and gives me space to add detail to my notes.

    I haven’t yet decided on how I plan to capture meeting notes, but that’s something I can work on through the month. The key thing is, I am not putting too much on in one go. What matters is that my thoughts, ideas, actions, and notes go into the book and that I regularly review and move things around to make sure nothing gets lost.

    More than anything, I think bullet journaling has turned out to be less about the spreads and the systems and more about giving myself a tiny, daily reminder: I am the kind of person who shows up for myself, even if it’s messy.

    Not perfectly. Not beautifully. But consistently enough to matter.

    And if you’ve ever tried something like this and felt like a failure because it didn’t look like the pictures—maybe the problem wasn’t you. Maybe it was the pictures.

    So maybe we both give ourselves permission to try it badly. To drop the aesthetics and the performance. To do it quietly, for ourselves alone.

    Maybe that’s the point: not to build the perfect system, but to keep showing up as the person we want to become. One scrappy bullet at a time.

  • Rewriting the Room: building an environment to shape who I’m becoming

    Saturday, 10 a.m.—my tongue trips over the first Welsh syllable I’ve spoken in three weeks. By the time my friends return from their walk I’m gabbling away yn Gymraeg, grinning that they can eavesdrop on this new limb I’m growing. That eavesdrop moment made something click: changing myself means rewriting the room I’m in.

    I’m trying to change my life, and the hardest bit isn’t habits—it’s becoming the person who keeps them. James Clear once said “habits form based on frequency, not time”.

    Part of identity change that is difficult is that your identity shapes your environment, just as much as your environment shapes your identity. I am who I am because of the people around me, but I have chosen the people around me based on who I am. If I want to change who I am, then that environment might fight against me, or quite simply might no longer fit. Two examples of this come to mind that I wanted to share:

    At work, I was invited to join my department for a lunchtime meal. I have been trying to track my food quite plainly so that I can work on getting the right intake and keeping myself consistent and on track, so I declined the invitation. Thus began a back-and-forth of being poked, prodded, and cajoled into attending the meal. A lot of what I heard is what I have heard before:

    “Come on, one lunch won’t hurt.”
    “You can’t have one cheat meal?”
    “Well, now I’m going to feel guilty ordering dessert.”

    At home, I spend a lot of my time online gaming with friends in the evening. It’s a low-pressure, low-effort way to socialise and it’s been a great way to connect recently. I have also been trying to embed a habit of going to the gym at 6am. This means, in order to get up early, I have to go to bed a little earlier. This means leaving the gaming earlier than the others. When I mention that I’m dropping off early, and when I tell them the reasons why, I hear a lot of:

    “Come on, one more. Just one more.”
    “Why would anyone want to get up that early?”
    “Just go the day after instead.”

    Both of those scenarios are about the same thing: I try to take an action to reaffirm the identity I am trying to craft. In both scenarios, I meet resistance. Friction. My current environment pushing back and trying to stop me changing. It’s frustrating, and it adds to the difficulty of trying to make that change.

    But, I have to remember that the environment I am in is a product of the identity I used to have. It isn’t that these people don’t want what is best for me, but it is simply human nature to resist change and to gravitate toward maintaining the status quo. It doesn’t mean that they don’t want me to change, but it means that I need to think about how I secure my choices to provide the least amount of opportunities for that resistance to come in.

    So the question becomes: how do I effectively protect myself against this friction in a way that establishes boundaries, reinforces my new identity, and doesn’t alienate other people around me?

    That’s a tall order, and one that I need to tackle from a few angles. So here are my three strategies for behaviour change that sticks and allows me to push back against that friction.

    1. Establish clearly defined boundaries.

    Right now, my boundaries are flexible, and unclear. I track my food, but I’m not clear on what food I am trying to eat. I am going to bed early, but I don’t specify at which times or on what days. I am dedicating some nights to being creative, but I don’t say when or what I am planning to do.

    I need to have clearly defined plans and specify what those plans are quickly and succinctly. I need to clarify and enumerate where my lines in the sand are, so I know who I want to be and how I want to be that person.

    This is a topic I plan to go into in more detail in a future post about Implementation Intentions and more of the science about habit formation.

    2. Simple boundary clarification scripts.

    Being able to enforce a boundary in the moment is difficult. How do you know what to say, how to say it, and to do it in a simple and concise, compassionate manner when you are suddenly confronted with that resistance.

    Once I have defined where my boundaries are, I can construct simple responses I can lean on and pull out any time the situation demands. These can be as simple as “I am able to game tonight, but I have to be off by 9.45.” or “I’ve already planned my meals for today, so I won’t be able to join.”

    Again, another topic I want to cover in more detail, specifically around compassionate accountability and having difficult conversations with people.

    3. Social accountability.

    Having a boundary and knowing what to say to enforce it is only the first step; the next is the follow through. In each of these spheres of resistance, I need allies. People who can help me hold myself to account with the behaviours I want to embed. These secret support systems can help me to stay on track and not feel alone in the journey I am on.

    I need to explain to my allies what I am trying to achieve, how I would like them to support me, and reinforce that my desire to change my behaviours is about my journey and not about them needing to take those steps with me, just to support me along the way.

    This is again—surprise—a topic I want to cover in a future post. Specifically, the idea of how to find support without expecting others to take the same steps as you.

    I don’t think this is going to be easy. If it were easy, I wouldn’t be struggling to maintain my boundaries right now. It is difficult to tell people that you need to act differently because you want to become a new person. Sometimes that means the environments around you need to change, and sometimes that means people don’t always survive the transition and stick around after the shift.

    So this phase of the experiment for me:

    1. Map out my boundaries in clear and precise detail
    2. Plan and practice boundary clarifying statements
    3. Identify and speak to allies on each of my boundaries

    Easier said than done, but more steps along the journey to identity change.

    Diolch am ddarllen—Thanks for reading. Whether it goes well or goes poorly, I’ll be back to tell you how it goes.

    Your turn: What boundary are you drawing this week and how are you keeping it affirmed? Drop it in the comments.

  • When Self-Improvement Becomes Self-Aggression

    Step 1.
    Decide on a new habit you want to embed into your life.

    Step 2.
    Come up with a simple way of tracking how you get on, adding that accountability into the mix.

    Step 3.
    Miss a single day and berate yourself for always being a failure, for never amounting to anything, and for not being able to commit to anything.

    That has been my cycle of self-improvement for over a decade. The gap between steps 2 and 3 might vary in length, sometimes it’s a few weeks, sometimes even months, sometimes it’s only a few hours, but step 3 always comes. It’s inevitable. Like the cycle of the seasons. As sure as George R. R. Martin is about the oncoming cold season, I can be sure that I will be beating myself for not sticking to something I committed to.

    It’s all too easy to fall into that cycle—moving from positive intentions to self-flagellation the moment we slip. And once you’ve slipped up, it’s that much harder to get back on the horse. Where you were and where you have fallen to just seem too far away from one another. What’s the point in even starting the climb again immediately? I’ve fucked it up. I need to regroup, replan, and try again later. And until then, I will make myself feel terrible, holding out hope that next time will be different.

    Self-improvement sells. Capitalism has learned to monetize the dream of a better life, one habit tracker and celebrity cookbook at a time. Like everyone else, I feel that pull. You’re reading this blog, you know I feel that pull.

    The thing is, the desire to change, the desire to improve, it isn’t actually a bad thing. It’s good, it pushes us to be better, do better, to go beyond what we currently are and discover who we are capable of being. That’s all amazing. The problem is how that message is packaged and sold. It’s turned from a journey of self-discovery into a formula for repeating someone else’s success. I say that as someone who still struggles now with looking for the perfect system, the optimal solution, the exact balance of all things that will make success just happen.

    Spoiler: it’s all a marketing gimmick.

    You know that. I know that. It’s not a surprise that capitalism lied to us to get our money. Knowing that it’s not true doesn’t take away the desire for it. And it doesn’t take away the behaviours we have learned in our pursuit of it.

    Our brains are built with a built-in threat radar: the amygdala in the ancient limbic system. It evolved to scream “danger!” at the smallest hint of trouble so we’d survive saber-toothed tigers. Today, that same alarm goes off if we miss a check-mark on a habit tracker—even though there’s nothing life-threatening about it. Meanwhile, the slow, wise prefrontal cortex—the part that dreams up goals and long-term plans—loses its tug-of-war with the limbic system every time our alarm bells ring.

    When you skip one day, the expected dopamine hit vanishes and midbrain neurons fire a negative “oops” signal, literally weakening the new behaviour. Then our brains—hardwired to focus in on negative experiences over positive ones—loop the mistake on repeat in the anterior cingulate, fueling guilt and rumination. Before you know it, that single slip feels like proof you can’t change, and you bail on the whole thing—even though every logical part of you knows you shouldn’t.

    You’re fighting against your own neurology.

    Kristen Neff talks about self-compassion in her book. She says “Self-compassion involves being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.” I definitely don’t feel like I do that at all. If you asked me, I would be able to tell you all the reasons I *should* be compassionate to myself, and all the reasons that behaviour change is hard. I wrote this entire post explaining exactly that point. But inside, I am still angry that I didn’t stick to my planned meals today. Right now, I feel more whale than person—though even as I think it, a quieter voice reminds me that feelings aren’t facts.

    I know that this cycle is killing me. I know that every time I end the day feeling like shit I will start the day wondering why I bother. I know that setting the stakes so high only gives me further to fall. I know that I am burning myself out on this belief that I am not capable of being anything other than I am right now and I know that I can’t keep doing it anymore.

    I need to change the way I talk to myself when I fall short of my goals. Brené Brown says it best that “shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.” Most days I don’t even believe that part of me exists. I feel like it died a long time ago.

    What can I do about it? How can I step out of this cycle?

    Firstly, I can learn to give myself a break. If I start to change my behaviours and I screw up one day, then I need to stop, take a deep breath and say “ok, once won’t ruin things.” Which is far easier for me to type now, than it is for me to do it tomorrow. So new rule:

    If I mess up, I will pause, forgive myself, and immediately take one small step to rebuild the habit. No shame. No delay.

    I also will be looking at how I build habits into my daily life. Almost once a year I listen to the audiobook for Atomic Habits, because when I have applied his methods, James Clear’s advice has really changed my life around. I haven’t been doing it for a while though, so I will return for his advice one more time.

    Finally, I will remind myself that I am doing the best I can right now and some days that best will be getting up in the morning and getting through the day. I will remind myself that I cannot be perfect every single minute of the day and I will remind myself that one slip does not negate weeks of forward progress.

    Progress is messy. It’s weird and non-linear and often brutal. But each step forward is still a step forward. Each choice to act like the person I want to become is a crack in the chains of the person I used to be.

    Tomorrow, when I miss a habit or break a streak, I’ll pause. I’ll take one small step forward anyway. I’ll remind myself:

    A stumble isn’t the end of the journey. It’s part of it.

    References

    [1] James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018)
    [2] Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself (2011)
    [3] Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (2007)

  • Morning Routines and Magical Thinking

    My alarm goes off at 5.30am and I get out of bed. I brush my teeth, have a shower, then cleanse, tone, and moisturise my skin. I go to the kitchen where a cup of coffee awaits me, freshly brewed from ground beans in the timed machine I set up the night before. I meditate for ten minutes, then journal for fifteen minutes. The sunlight streams through the window and I am ready to face the day.

    In an ideal world, that would be how every day starts. A few times I have even managed a morning like that.

    It never lasts.

    Routines are a big part of the self-help package deal. Habits, mindfulness, and routines seem like the top three things that come up whenever I embark on this journey. Routines hold the allure of being a reset button. A ritualised defence against chaos, as though a few behaviours might hold back the immeasurable madness of the world.

    My problem has always been that I never can get that morning routine just right. Do I want to meditate or do yoga? Or try some Tai Chi? Do I want breakfast, or just a protein shake? Should I be journaling or free-writing? Should I be getting up early, or would I function better with an extra 30 minutes of good sleep? It seems that every time I try to redefine myself, I seem to reinvent my mornings.

    This is a recurring trap I fall into. I pin all my hopes for transformation on the morning routine, like it’s some sacred keystone—get this right, and everything else will fall into place. Routines take on a symbolic weight far beyond their practical function. They become rituals of becoming. A redoubt for the change-weary, a series of methodical movements we use to summon the person we want to be. I tell myself that if I just perfect this sequence—wake early, meditate, journal, move, eat well—then surely, change will follow.

    And maybe that’s not entirely wrong. I think back to James Clear’s Atomic Habits: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” What else are systems, if not the routines we build to hold us together when motivation gives way? That’s the promise, isn’t it? Build the right systems and the rest will follow.

    James Clear is right, by the way. Our systems are the baseline to which we will fall when all other motivation has ceased. When the excitement and the novelty of trying has eroded beneath our feet on the fifth day of “new week, new me”, we fall to the systems that have lasted the longest, even if they no longer serve who we’re trying to become. We see the gap between who we are and who we aim to be, but we fail to see that the rickety bridge of routine was never going to span that ravine alone.

    When we “fail” a routine, when we skip a day and tell ourselves “tomorrow we’ll get back to it”, we are engaging in an act of denial. That lack of commitment is a hit to our identity. It becomes another piece of evidence that the person we are simply cannot become the person that we aspire to be. It becomes another scuffed step in the dance and we stumble and falter and eventually stop. We take the rest of the week off. We tell ourselves we’ll try again. We tell ourselves next time will be different.

    So what do we take from this? Routines are the enemy and we shouldn’t be trying? It’s easy to look at the evidence and conclude “well, I tried my best, but it looks like I’m not actually cut out to change. It just isn’t something that I can do.” It’s easy to just give up.

    The truth, the cold, hard, difficult truth, is that change is hard. If it were easy to change who you were, then no one would be miserable. Any time you started to feel discontent, you would just choose a new identity to put on like a new pair of shoes and off you go walking a new path. It doesn’t work like that of course, so there’s something more to unpack here.

    In his book Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg says that “emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Emotions.” This helps us to understand what we need to do, but it also helps us understand how we got here. James Clear talks about this as well, of course. The habits we have, the ones we want to break, exist because they serve us in some way. The routines we naturally fall back on are the ones that gave us something in the past, and so we learned the behaviours by rote. Changing those behaviours is possible, but it is tough.

    The problem with the “new routine” approach, at least for me, is that a new routine deceives you into thinking you’re making one change, when really you are making many. A “new morning routine” might sound like one simple change, when in fact it hides a plethora of new behaviours that don’t align with who you are right now. Skincare, brushing your teeth, meditating, having breakfast, doing yoga—any of these might not be part of your life right now. But a new routine tricks you into bundling them together, as though they were a single, simple change.

    What I am learning to do, with some difficulty, is to take that step back and ask myself—really ask myself—what is actually important to me right now? Oliver Burkeman talks about this in his book Four Thousand Weeks. He reminds us of the lie we tell ourselves, that despite what we might like to believe: time is finite.

    The problem with trying to make time for everything that feels important—or just enough of what feels important—is that you definitely never will.

    I have been sitting with this quote quite a bit this week, as I have gone back and forth, yet again, on my own routines. James Clear urges systems. Burkeman urges restraint. Somewhere between them, I’m learning to be selective—to strip things back and start from what matters most.

    But what makes the cut?

    What do I choose to focus on and what actually doesn’t matter to me right now? How do I select the things that absolutely must form the foundations of who I want to become? How do I build that firmament on which to erect the temple of who I’m becoming? And again I am brought back to that question: Who do I actually want to be?

    I still don’t have the answer to that, but I do know how to reshape my relationship to routine. Routines became the ritual performance of improvement that I used to lie to myself that change was happening. Now I choose to view them as permission to adapt the habits of old into new opportunities to choose who I want to become. James Clear, again, once told me “every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” I am choosing to view my routines as a chance to take that vote again, and again, and again.

    I’m not lazy, or undisciplined, or a failure. I am a person in flux. And that is ok.

    Magical thinking is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it leads us to believe the impossible is real. That the right routine can transform us into somebody new, if we can just find the right combination of steps. It tricks us into looking for simple solutions and handy checklists for success. On the other hand, it gives us a glimpse of something truly incredible—our ability to believe in new beginnings.

    I don’t believe that a perfect routine exists that will make me who I need to become, but I do believe that I can figure it out and become him.

    And, honestly, that’s just the kind of magic I need.

    References

    [1] James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018)
    [2] BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything (2019)
    [3] Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021)

  • I Don’t Deserve to be Happy

    One of my aims this year was pretty simple: no pretending, just honesty. So that’s what I’m practicing today. Honesty. The pure, simple honesty of saying: I do not deserve to be happy.

    I don’t. It’s a difficult thing to hear and an even more difficult thing to say—and to mean—but the truth of the statement cannot be ignored. It sounds cold—heartless, even. But it’s true. I do not deserve to be happy.

    I also do not deserve to be sad.

    My aim is to face reality, and the truth is that reality is indifferent to me. I don’t matter to the universe. There is no grand design for the journey of my life and there is no cosmic point system the tallies up the effort put in and the reward that should come out. Life doesn’t work like that.

    Narcissism

    In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson explores the idea of narcissism. It’s a topic I have done a lot of thinking about before reading the book, as it’s a trait I recognise in a few key figures in my life. My mother for one. An ex-boyfriend or two, definitely. But also in myself. It’s difficult not to be narcissistic sometimes. The only experience we get is our own, and so it is easy to default to interpreting the world through the lens of that experience and by that logic, I am the most fundamental aspect in all creation. Cogito ergo sum, so screw the idea that anyone else matters.

    Manson breaks it down into two seemingly different, but actually similar, forms of narcissism. His description is far more effective, but how I have come to understand it is:

    1. I am unique and special and talented and destined for greatness and therefore, I should be given special treatment.
    2. My life is terrible and miserable and far worse than anyone else’s could possibly be and no one can understand what I have been through and therefore, I should be given special treatment.

    Two seemingly opposite viewpoints, but the same goal. I am different from you and therefore I should be treated differently.

    I had experienced little of the first form, to be honest. I heard about it, of course, and on very rare occasions could see it in myself. At university, it came out most. I felt I had particularly strong skills as a writer, as a cinematographer, as a colour grader. I was above everyone else, and so in those fields, my opinion carried more weight. I knew at the time that it was a form of narcissism and sometimes I tried to rein that in. Sometimes I didn’t.

    The second form of narcissism is the one with which I am intimately acquainted. I grew up in an environment in which challenges and struggles were sacrosanct. Things that made your life more difficult were badges of honour to be worn with pride, polished up and displayed at every single opportunity. Show your scars, for they are what makes you beautiful. I thought this was empowering, reclaiming hardship and making it powerful.

    As I have aged, I have begun to see it differently. There is a narcissism that comes from that kind of celebration of hardship. “She is so strong for managing to live through that”, “He is so incredible for not letting that stop him from trying”. It’s hardship weaponised. Turned into currency. A way to win points, sympathy, admiration. I had thought I was reclaiming pain. But maybe I was just rebranding it.

    Now, it is important to say that I am in no way saying that we shouldn’t be proud of the challenges we have overcome, or that we shouldn’t take pride in the achievements we make against adverse circumstances. There is power in reclaiming hardship.

    The difficult comes when that pride becomes an expectation. There is a fine line between “I am proud because I deal with this” and “You should be proud because I deal with this”. I grew up in a world where that line didn’t exist. Challenges were points that would earn you attention. The longer your list of challenges, the more valuable you were as a person. Ours was the family that if we didn’t go to the GP with a full list of problems, then it wasn’t worth going. We had a prize to win, and we were going to keep finding problems until we had enough to take the top spot.

    Impact

    I grew up with the knowledge that being broken meant I was important. Having challenge meant that I mattered. I was better than other people because of the struggles that I overcame. I was worth more because I had to try harder to achieve the same things. When I was first diagnosed with depression at 14, it was almost a moment of celebration. I had a diagnosis, that was worth a lot of points, surely? That meant I was having to work so much harder than other kids my age and I was still doing well at school. I was an inspiration.

    My mother fed on this. She would routinely tell people about the struggles her children were facing, because she needed the validation of how inspirational she was to be supporting a child dealing with such difficulties. When the depression diagnosis lost it’s pull, she pushed for me to be assessed for bi-polar disorder. When my sister struggled with school and self-discipline, she pushed doctors to consider Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. My mother wasn’t a bad person, don’t get me wrong, but her value came from her hardships and that behaviour was one that I learned too.

    It became so ingrained in me that my value came from my hardships that when I couldn’t find more, I learned to lie about them. I developed quite a skill at finding hardships that couldn’t be proven. Some of them I still lie about.

    When I started university, I told people that I was unable to drink alcohol due to a medical condition. It was a clever lie, because the medical condition is probably true. But I added the part about alcohol, because it set me apart from everyone else. I was different, and that made me special. A long time ago I lied at an opticians appointment during some tests and they said I was colourblind. I still tell that lie now. I told that lie three days ago. Not because I had to. Just out of reflex. A way to remind people—and myself—that I still have value.

    There may well be people reading this right now, people who know me offline, who didn’t even realise that some of these were lies. I hope you aren’t upset with me, though if you are I understand and I hope you can understand even if you can’t forgive.

    So What Now?

    So where does this leave me? What is the point of this post?

    I’ve been trying to look at myself the past few weeks, through the lens of the radical honesty I want to live this year in and that has given me a new perspective. I grew up learning to see the narcissism in others. I never told my mother about the medical condition because I knew she would use it to get attention. I distanced myself from her for a number of years because I needed to separate myself from that cycle. But this year, I needed to turn that light inwards.

    I have been a narcissist. I am still being a narcissist. I have catalogued my various traumas, and bulked out the list with some that I invented, because I believed that struggle would give me value. The truth is, though, that struggle is not unique. Everybody struggles. Different people struggle in different ways and my struggle is no more—or less—important than anyone else’s. My struggle is my own, and I should be proud of what I have overcome, but real pride is quiet. It’s something you see in your smile in the mirror, not something you should from the window at passers by.

    Part of the journey for me now is to unpack the boxes of my life and interrogate what I find. I know there are untruths in there that are going to be difficult to dispose of cleanly, but mixed in with them will be things I need to acknowledge. I can’t get rid of the lie about alcohol without recognising that there is actually a core part of me that doesn’t want to drink. I haven’t had alcohol in 7 and a half years and I can see no part of my future where that ever changes. The lie is still there, but beneath it is a truth: that I genuinely don’t want to drink. That part matters. That part is real.

    I don’t deserve to be happy. I don’t deserve to be sad. I don’t deserve to be admired, or hated, or praised, or derided.

    I don’t deserve anything.

    Nobody does. That’s the point. Life isn’t fair. It’s mostly chance, some choice, and a whole lot of chaos. What matters to me now is how I choose to view it and what those choices look like. If I want to be happy—and I do—then I need to recognise that it isn’t something I can force into existence. Happiness is a by-product of living a life that aligns with my values, and that means some serious realignment ahead. Who do I want to live as—and how will I know when I’ve become him, not just performed him?

    That’s the next step for me.

    References

    [1] – Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016)

  • Auditing My Life (And Why It Matters)

    This week I realised something terrifying: I have no idea why I’m doing any of this.

    In my last post, I mentioned something Derek Sivers said: most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. That line stuck with me. If I don’t have that clarity—if I can’t name my ‘why’—then how the hell am I supposed to know what direction to go in?

    Blindly struggling forward isn’t strategy. It’s survival. And I’m tired of surviving.

    I need a plan. And to build one, I need to know where I’m starting from.

    How do you figure out what you need to do when you don’t even know where you’re starting from? I went around in a circle for a few weeks over this, until I settled on the idea of treating this the way I would a programme of work in my job. If I need to figure out what’s wrong, then we start from an audit.

    I sat down at my computer, screamed my frustrations into ChatGPT, and together we came up with a plan of attack. It took hours—and several rewrites—to figure out what I was even trying to do. I didn’t just want a surface-level check-in. I wanted to rip off the covers and stare directly into the crawlspace of my life. To unpick every thread—good, bad, and bewildering—and lay it all out without flinching.

    Eventually, I landed on a structure that broke my life down into key domains: things like Physical Health, Career, Finances. The full list is below if you’re curious.

    My domains
    • Physical health
    • Mental health
    • Education and learning
    • Career (current role and future development)
    • Work-life balance
    • Relationships (friends, family, romantic)
    • Financial health (income, budgeting, savings and debt)
    • Home and environment (organisation, living situation, daily routines)
    • Hobbies (creative outlets, physical activity, entertainment)
    • Community (volunteering, civic engagement, networking)
    • Spirituality
    • Mindfulness

    This seemed to me to be a pretty exhaustive list and I couldn’t think of a single area of my life that didn’t fit under one category or another.

    Domains determined, the next step was to drill down into each of them. I pulled together a template with multiple questions for each area, asking me to really focus down into the specifics of each domain. The questions were designed to leave no stone unturned. I want this to be a framework I can come back to year after year to look at and see that ongoing progress.

    If you’re doing your own version of this, steal the template. Hack it apart. Make it yours.

    Annual Review Template (PDF)

    Annual Review Template (Markdown)

    So why an “audit”? Well, I figured that if I want to take this journey seriously, and if I want to really push myself to accept the harsh truths and make real, meaningful progress, then I needed to approach this as objectively as I can. An audit seemed like the appropriate way to do it. This stage is not about making any judgements, it is just about capturing things as they currently are, so that I can go through it in detail and pick out the bits I want to work on this year, and make those my priority.

    And there were a couple of key themes that my life audit 2025 brought out, some of which I expected, some which were more sharply highlighted than I expected. The five key themes I identified were:

    1. Progress in my life breaks down from a lack of reliable and sustainable systems to get me where I want to go.
      I constantly try new things, attempt to make change, but fall short each and every time because I lack consistency. I rely on motivation and positivity and just hoping that it will happen. The systems in my life don’t support change, they encourage stagnation.
    2. I am currently living a life which is out of sync with who I am at my core.
      I am trying to be lots of different things to lots of different people. I flex and shift my understanding of who I am to fit the needs of the situation, so much so that I don’t really know who I even am anymore. I am pulling at the seams to make it work, but I am losing myself in the middle.
    3. I have been trying to make change out of a shame-based self-discipline.
      If I fail, or if I am unable to do something I intended, I treat it as a personal failure. I am less because I didn’t do it. I tell myself I am pathetic because I didn’t go to the gym. That I am awful because I didn’t eat healthily. I have to “make it up” and repent for my poor behaviours.
    4. I have a distinct lack of a solid foundation on which to affect meaningful long-term change.
      My days run on chaos. There’s no structure—just a string of reactions and guilt-fuelled decisions. I get up and hope for the best. I fall into bed whenever I manage to get myself to stop what I’m doing. I eat when I remember, I go for a walk if I feel like it. I go to the gym when I can guilt myself into doing it. I write when I can be bothered.
    5. I crave connection and often seek this out at the cost of my dignity or personal values.
      Some of my friendships are surface level, and some are barely even that. I have a deep seated need to feel wanted and I am willing to say anything, do anything, be anything– just to feel that validation. Even when it costs me parts of myself.

    Reading it back still makes my stomach drop.

    I have to admit, I sat with this for a while. Seeing my responses laid out bare like that and identifying these key patterns of behaviour, was an incredibly difficult experience. Those key themes are a stark look at the core, fundamental problems that I have spent the last 8 months trying to identify. Turns out, I did know what was wrong, I just didn’t know how to articulate it.

    But what do I do with this? Those themes are huge, and they are not something I can change overnight. I can’t devise some three step plan to radically shift things overnight. That just isn’t how these kinds of issues work. So, what can I do? I can take these themes and identify one thing I can work toward, one step I can take. One experiment I can try to see if it makes a difference.

    The core goals for my next 12 months are starting from foundations and building into core pillars of my life, my physical health, my creative practice, and my emotional wellbeing. These are the three I am focusing on for now. Each month, I have a small selection of goals that will build me toward those overarching objectives. Every month I will review my progress.

    Consider me to be under Regulatory Oversight. I’ve appointed myself as the inspector. Full accountability. No more fudging the numbers. I need a firm hand at the wheel to steer this ship and there is a lot of work to be done to get things right. It feels a little hopeless, but I remind myself that the aggregation of marginal gains will see me through this. Once those miniscule efforts reach a critical threshold, they will begin paying dividends.

    So, that’s the starting point. Cold. Stark. Harrowing. A reflection of where I truly am right now, and some vague understanding of the way forward. I hope that in a year’s time I am writing about how successful the year has been. The plan is good. I just don’t trust myself to follow through.

    And that terrifies me.

  • The Year I Stop Pretending

    2020 was a time of absolute chaos, especially working in the NHS. I wasn’t a clinical worker, but I was part of the team that trained hundreds of students, health care support workers, and nurses to be redeployed back to the front lines. It was honestly the closest to hell I have ever experienced and every single day took more energy than I have ever experienced.

    It was also the only time I have ever felt fully in control of myself and of my life.

    With the pandemic plunging the world into turmoil and everyone being confined to their homes, I was able to get a handle on every aspect of my life outside work. I sorted my finances out and paid off thousands of pounds worth of debt. I lost 6 stone in weight. I completed a 5km run every single morning immediately after waking up. I wrote almost every day. Everything was working surprisingly well. And then the lockdown ended and a whole new kind of chaos came into my life.

    For four years, I have been trying to claw my way back to the version of me that had control. The lockdown me. The one who felt strong. I have tried repeatedly, and failed repeatedly.

    By 2024, I stopped pretending. My mental health tanked. I started seeing a therapist. Every week since then, we’ve been sorting through the wreckage of who I thought I was supposed to be. Trying to find pieces I might still use. In that mess, I started clinging to the voices I had already heard. The ones who promised clarity and answers.

    James Clear told me that I would “fall to the level of my systems”. The thing I have found out, is that my systems suck. They’re held together by duct-tape, self-help books, and more than a little blind hope.

    Mark Manson tells me that “who I am is defined by what I am willing to struggle for”. I have to accept that I don’t know what I am willing to struggle for. Maybe that’s the problem.

    Derek Sivers tells me that “most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing”. That one– that hit like a hammer.

    The point is that I am adrift. I am lost in a sea of not knowing what I am doing, where I am going, or who I want to be. I don’t know what I am willing to struggle for, what systems I need to be able to survive, and ultimately who I want to become. What I do know is what has worked for me in the past and the key thing for me is honesty.

    A few weeks ago, I had a day off work. I stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, deciding whether to get up or keep sleeping, trying to find something that might make the day pass quicker and get me closer to the place where I knew what role I was supposed to play. Back to work.

    That’s when the idea hit me–not as a grand plan, but more like a scream of desperation.

    What if I gave myself a year? Just one year to change. To try things. To move forward. Not towards a clear, fixed goal, but just… forward.

    So that’s what this is. The first step forward. A place to scream into the void of the internet, to document what I do in all its gory detail. No preaching, just reflection. No pretending, just process. No hiding, just honesty. One year of consistent effort.

    If you’re still with me, then maybe you’ve felt it too–that quiet ache of knowing you could be more, that you should be more, but not knowing where to start.

    I don’t know the answers. But I do know how to keep going. One post at a time. One failure at a time. One brutally honest admission at a time.

    So here we go. One year. One experiment. One geek’s guide to getting better.

    It might help. It might just be honest. Either way, it’s real.

    References

    [1] – James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (2018)
    [2] – Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016)
    [3] – Derek Sivers, Useful Not True (2024)

Geek's Guide to Getting Better

Becoming a better person one day at a time

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