Using principles of Habit formation in GMAT prep

I recently finished reading the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. A bestseller, the book lays out a framework for forming new habits and discarding existing ones and provides detailed guidance, including various hacks, on how to use the framework to change our daily habits. I believe that the ideas contained in the book can be extremely useful for a GMAT aspirant. In this article and the next, I’ve tried to share what I found most interesting from the book and how we can apply that to better prepare for the GMAT.

Key Principles

1. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate – C. G Jung

   The unconscious part of your life is the daily habits you engage in automatically i.e. without any conscious effort. For example: checking social media at the slightest hint of inactivity, watching Netflix before you sleep, going to a gym every day, etc. Not all habits are bad e.g. going to the gym. However, at least some of our habits are not aligned with our goals. While our goal may be to score 740+ on GMAT within the next 3 months, our watching Netflix every day for 2 hours doesn’t leave us much time to prepare. Or, we may not be watching Netflix but reading success stories or other people’s experiences on GMAT Club. Beyond a point, browsing GMAT Club also becomes a way to procrastinate the hard work of studying.

   To gain control over these habits, you need to first be aware of these habits. Awareness needs to be beyond just a passing acceptance ‘ya, I know that’; you need to track how much time you’re losing because of these habits that you could have spent preparing for the GMAT. How many weeks/months earlier would your GMAT journey end if you let go of these habits? You need to make the unconscious conscious. Otherwise, in some time, you’ll just accept as your fate ‘I think I can’t ace this test’.

2. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

   You feel motivated over a weekend and end up studying for 16 hours. And then, you wait for the next bout of motivation over the next two weeks without any success. What we can understand is that these one-off acts may help you in a small way but are not going to be sufficient to achieve your goal. The way to achieve your goal is to practice daily. However, practicing daily will be hard if you have to make a conscious decision every day to study. The decision has to become automatic or unconscious. In other words, studying has to become a habit. We’ll learn in this article how to form this habit.

3. Forget about goals, Focus on systems instead – James Clear
   Here’s what the book says, 
   

   Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific, actionable goals.

   For many years, this was how I approached my habits, too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business. I succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.

   What’s the difference between systems and goals? It’s a distinction I first learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

   The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

   Similarly, once you’ve set your target score, thinking about your goal is likely just a waste of time; what’s going to help you is the system or the processes you design to achieve that goal. Once you focus on learning, the score will take care of itself.

   The author asks us to be “far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results”.

4. Power of Marginal Improvement
   

   The fate of British Cycling changed one day in 2003. The organization, which was the governing body for professional cycling in Great Britain, had recently hired Dave Brailsford as its new performance director. At the time, professional cyclists in Great Britain had endured nearly one hundred years of mediocrity. Since 1908, British riders had won just a single gold medal at the Olympic Games, and they had fared even worse in cycling’s biggest race, the Tour de France.1, 2 In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the event.

   And then in just five years, Brailsford transformed the team, which went onto win 60% of the gold medals in 2008 Beijng Olympics and which raised the bar even further by setting 9 Olympic records and 7 world records in 2012 London Olympics. 

   How did this transformation happen?

   By focusing on improving 1% at a time. Brailsford believed that by making 1% improvement in a host of areas, the cumulative improvement would be much more significant. 

   It’s very easy to underestimate marginal improvements since they look small and insignificant at the moment. However, over a period of time, they can lead to significant results. For example, 1% improvement may look insignificant and, because of our linear thinking, we may believe that over a 365 day period, we’ll be 0.01*365 i.e. 3.65 times better. However, improvement compounds. Thus, a 1% improvement over 365 days will make us 37 times better.

   At a 10% growth rate, 1 becomes 117 in 50 days. In our linear thinking, we may believe that it’ll take 100 days to make it 234. However, it takes a little less than 8 days for it to jump from 117 to more than 240. That’s the power of compounding. 

   So, when you make small changes in your life to achieve your goals, these changes, over time, will have an impact that is significantly greater than you expect.

In the next article, we’ll use these principles and an understanding of how habits form to talk about how to build habits that will help you achieve your target GMAT score in the shortest possible time.

I’ll be happy to hear from you in the comments below 🙂