The Achievement Habit

The Achievement Habit shows you that being an achiever can be learned, by using the principles of design thinking to walk you through several stories and exercises, which will get you to stop wishing and start doing.

Have you ever been late to a meeting? Of course you have, everyone has.

Chances are, the 2 minutes before you entered the room your mind was racing through your journey of getting there, looking for anything and everything that might have potentially caused a delay.

Was there a lot of traffic?

Did your car make funny noises?

An old lady stopped you to ask for directions?

Magically, your brain always finds a reason, so when you enter that room, you can feel relieved and just say: “Sorry guys, INSANE traffic today!”

Here’s the problem: You knew about all these eventual delays.

You knew the traffic would be a problem, your car’s been acting up for weeks, and being asked for directions can always happen.

You simply didn’t make the meeting enough of a priority to leave as early as you needed to, in order to get there on time.

That’s because in most of all cases, the reasons we assign to certain events are really just correlations, not causations.

For example you might tell a friend you don’t have time to help, but in reality you just want to finish watching a movie. Later that day, you spill your coffee all over yourself.

Of course your brain instantly jumps to the conclusion that because you lied to your friend, you are now being punished – but really it’s just a coincidence.

Similarly, someone might call you the very day you thought of them again after a long time. You might already plan your career as a psychic, but in reality, you think about 300 people a day, and it just so happened that one of them called you.

Your brain naturally assigned meaning to that one person, ignoring all the 299 that didn’t call you.

So stop looking for reasons everywhere, because they block you from making decisions and actually changing your behavior.

Know that most of the things you think are causally linked are really just correlated.

Reframing is one of Bernie’s big ideas in the book. Simply by changing the angle you take to look at a problem, you might make it a lot easier, or figure out it’s not a problem at all. Here’s one exercise in particular, which I loved: Instead of saying something like: “I want to watch a movie tonight, but I have to work.” say “I want to watch a movie tonight, and I have to work.” When you say the former, you’ve created a…