MM#355 -- Foundations in Flourishing, pt.2 - Systems and Habits

0:07 Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser. Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute and to this second podcast of our series called Foundations in Flourishing. And how do we get to this series called Foundations in Flourishing? Well, I talked a little bit about it in our last podcast, but if you didn't catch that one, a quick summary is you had given us so much feedback that you were liking this series or any of the series that we have done.

1:01 You were liking the long series format and you were liking the depth of the history, especially when we use two or three books, when we start to connect those dots. Because what I'm hearing from most of you is that's just something out of reach. You just don't want to take the time to research two or three or four books to get to the crux of the issue or where does the truth lie. And so you appreciated someone else doing the work for you and I don't mind doing that work and helping to enrich your lives a little bit more, a little bit deeper.

1:43 And for some of the rest of you, you were like, hey, I just frankly don't have time. I'm running a business, I have a family. I even have a family with little ones. So my days and nights are absolutely crazy and this is a welcome relief to get long-form content while on the road, on my commute, on the treadmill or during a work stoppage. So, um, and some times, frankly, some of you said I was putting you to sleep while the kids were laying down. So I will. I will take that as a victory lap. Anytime I can help the parents get a good nap in while the kids were laying down.

2:25 Then amen. But we appreciate, you know, we appreciate you giving us that feedback and, after giving it some thought, about what could have been our next series, since you guys love the Pivotal Tuesday series so much. So for our next project, we said we were going to go back to the basics because we were going to answer the fundamental question After 15 years of reading the good books, after doing tons of research and finding these nuggets of wisdom, what are the most fundamental aspects of life, what are the most important?

3:08 What are the best books that talk about these fundies, as we like to call them here? What's the very best people saying about these fundies across all different domains, across different books? So that's our series, the Foundations in Flourishing, where we're going to tackle the best books in certain domains to provide you with those great nuggets of wisdom. And we'll keep going on. We'll probably keep coming back to the foundations because it's always good to go back to the basics and we need not to lose sight of how we do make ourselves better and how we help those around us to become better. How do we practice the virtues better?

3:48 How do we, in a word, flourish? So we're covering three books today. All of these are in the Mojo Academy, but we're revisiting them again on purpose, because they are so fundamentally foundational. They are the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, many Habits by Stephen Geyes and Atomic Habits by James Clear. And how do all of these fit together? Well, habits in our morning routines are super important. In fact, they almost layer on top of each other like a perfect glove.

4:29 And to demonstrate this, let's go to our first pull quote. Whether you want to make significant improvements in just a few key areas or you're ready for a major overhaul that will radically transform your entire life, so your current circumstances will soon become only a memory of what was. You've picked up the right book. You're about to begin a miraculous journey using a simple but revolutionary process that is guaranteed to transform any area of your life all before 8 am. And the revolutionary process that Hal Elrod that's who we just heard from Hal Elrod in the Miracle Morning.

5:13 The revolutionary process that Hal is talking about, and which we expand upon in our Academy review of that book, is the consistent, methodical, daily pursuit of excellence and, at a subconscious level, the implementation of building up our virtues by doing that, of having a regular morning routine. How so, you might ask. Well, let's go back to the book for that answer. How you wake up each day in your morning routine or lack thereof, how you wake up each day in your morning routine or lack thereof dramatically affects your levels of success in every single area of your life.

5:56 Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, unfocused, unproductive and mediocre days and ultimately, a mediocre quality of life. By simply changing the way you wake up in the morning, you can transform any area of your life faster than you ever thought possible. So you can have two approaches. You can wake up every day focused, productive, and know exactly how your morning is going to go before the craziness of the world will intrude on it.

6:44 Or you can wake up late, unfocused, unproductive, and then allow the craziness of the world to run you from fire alarm to fire alarm. Does this sound familiar For me? I have firmly believed in having a structured morning where you can accomplish those same habits each and every morning and those systematically progress you towards your goals and to build your life towards reaching your potential. And this is one of the most fundamental elements that I'm most passionate about because, like I said, for the last 12 years or so hard to pinpoint give or take maybe 30 to 45 days over that time period, but for the last 12 years I have been executing on the miracle morning process.

7:45 Now it will change over time. I tweak this here, I move that there, but the structure and the time commitment each and every morning I have been unwavering on. And so that is the first of the foundational elements that I would recommend to anyone, because, like the title says, it will revolutionize your life, and I can say for sure that it did mine. It was a complete game changer. Now moving on to our next consequential book Atomic Habits. Now, before we talk about Atomic Habits, I have a motivational poster. It sits next to me on my desk where I work on these Mojo Minutes each and every morning and I'm looking at it as I speak.

8:33 It says watch your thoughts for they become words. Watch your words for they become actions. Watch your actions because they can become habits. Watch your habits for they become your character, and watch your character for it becomes your destiny, what we think we become. And I love this poster for two reasons. I believe wholeheartedly that that poster and what it talks about meshes and aligns with, as a Christian and a Catholic, what I believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, that Jesus Christ was and is the way, the truth and the life.

9:16 And if that supposition is to be believed, then you have to study his life in detail and his words in detail. And so when he says the words from the Gospel of Matthew, 15, 18,. But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness and slander. These are what defile a man. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man. The connection between the words that are spoken and that motivational poster that you watch your thoughts for they become your words and you watch your words for they become actions and you watch your actions for they become habits.

10:07 That really and profoundly resonates with me and I thought that's very, very close to the truth. And we see this in action every day in our lives. Where the battle becomes so we don't murder or fornicate or have all these evil thoughts that Christ talked about. The battle is there in the heart of man, in his or her thoughts. That's where we have to do battle, and part of that battle then becomes downstream in your habits. And so that brings me to our second book, our most second consequential book of today's episode Atomic Habits, by James Clear.

10:58 There is not a better book written on how to create or destroy habits. In my belief, you want to create good habits and you want to destroy bad habits. So let me just grab the opening quote from this book because, frankly, it is that good. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again, not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, focusing on the overall system rather than a single goal is one of the core themes of this book.

11:50 It also has one of the deeper meanings behind the word atomic. By now you probably realize that an atomic habit refers to a tiny change, a marginal gain, a 1% improvement. But atomic habits are not just any old habits, however small, they are little habits that are part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results. And again, like I said in our last episode, there are nuggets of wisdom. And then there are golden nuggets of wisdom that I should just keep harping on over and over for your sake and my sake.

12:36 We all just need to hear these drummed into us. And that last quote that we just read it is that you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Again, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Again, you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Stop the podcast and write that down in your phone or jot it down on a sheet of paper. Whatever you got to do, you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems, because that is so, so true. So the overlapping of our habits and our systems, like the miracle morning, is super good.

13:23 It produces so much virtue. And if we set up these virtue habits and if you're having a hard time creating good habits and eliminating bad habits, check out the newly released Academy Review titled Many Habits. That book is super effective in helping you to understand how to boil down habits to so small, so unbelievably, absurdly small, that you have to do them. You would be stupid to not do them, but again, in doing them you are building that tiny atomic microgram of virtue and virtue begins virtue.

14:06 And you do that daily, you do that hourly, you do that by the minute. You will, and you've got to be patient with yourself. You will get better. You just have to do the hard work of doing those super small but good habits. At my church it's run by Dominican friars and St Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican and possibly one of the smartest dudes to understand how the world really works and to teach us all about that. He was a very, very good teacher and he's credited with a phrase in theology called grace builds upon nature or, to be more precise, grace perfects nature, meaning God's grace does indeed work.

15:03 Work, but God created us humans in a way that we have to do the small fraction of helping ourselves. We have to take that small step, we have to ask, we have to take the first step. So that is another golden nugget of wisdom from today. Now about this feedback thing. Did I say we like feedback? Yes, yes, in fact I did. We do appreciate you guys sharing that feedback with us. We got them from that Pivotal Tuesday series, and so we're asking you to give us continually your feedback.

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17:55 So in today's Mojo Minute, our systems will either help us or hurt us. If we can build effective systems, especially in the mornings, and we can create good habits in those systems, like the miracle morning outlines for us, we can begin to build grace upon nature and we can begin to get the ball running on building our flourishing life. And this is one of the most foundational blocks we can put in place and it will remain there for our whole lives. Once we put it in place and we continually see value in it, we make a tweak here, a tweak there.

18:35 The value is overwhelmingly big on our return of investment. So let us begin today. Let's have some high fives today for building and beginning a strong and sturdy foundation. As always, let's keep fighting the good fight. Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.