I remember reading this book the month it got released. I’ve never looked back into it when I finished it, and somehow, whatever learnings I gained from it faded from my brain. And now, 8 years later, for some reason I picked it up again, and I was reading it in awe like how could I not implement any of those wisdoms into my life? But I’m not harsh on myself the way I used to be, so I excused my past self for not knowing any better. I’m not saying that the book is god given, but I could say it talks about problems that I face on a daily basis.

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.

This is something engraved in my daily patterns. I used to barely do anything in my day because I kept waiting for those massive shattering moments to arrive in order to gain improvements.

I believe this pattern of thinking exists in everyone’s mind: some people seek it in the form of some godly inspiration or an epiphany, some are waiting for a winning ticket in the lottery to transform their lives, and some keep fantasizing about the moment that someone will discover them and boost them through their career ladder. Even though these transformations do exist, their probability is very low, and the probability of stalling your life increases with every minute spent waiting for them.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

This paragraph did affect my outlook on how daily habits or daily tiny actions compound into something greater. For example I enjoy creating music, and I’m trying to make it a daily habit. But every time I get frustrated by a creation I quit and never look back into it. Because I always have this expectation that I will have a genius moment and compose the perfect piece in one go. But progress takes time, and the genius composition is the result of compounding daily efforts.

Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things. When the votes mount up and the evidence begins to change, the story you tell yourself begins to change as well.

This is something I highly relate to. I personally face this internal conflict on a daily basis. I create something and never see it through and never publish it. Not because it is lacking, but rather because I don’t trust myself to see it finished. I believed in the story that I was the guy who does things and never finishes them, it became part of my identity, and somehow I was sold that this is a genius quirk like Da Vinci. Or I get to blame my ADHD and get away with it. Sharing quotes from the book will never gain you knowledge because mostly they are out of context, and context is where learning is gained. We all keep bumping into millions of quotes on the internet daily but they aren’t really impactful because we are not relating to them in the deepest levels, and we aren’t seeing the context behind them.

I’m writing these mostly for myself, so I can engrave these new ideas and learnings into my brain and my outlook on life.

Because I easily lose sight of what I read if I don’t take any action by writing them down or give them a personal context.