Improving by avoiding mistakes

Avoiding mistakes is an underrated way to improve. It's easier to fend off a bad day than achieve a perfect day. Rather than do your best, avoid your worst." - James Clear

I've been thinking about this quote lately.

Making mistakes is a great and fast way to learn. So in this sense mistakes are a phenomenal way to improve.

But these aren't the mistakes I think Clear is talking about. I think he's talking about ones, where we don't do the things that would make our lives better. Mistakes like choosing unhealthy food over better options. Like getting distracted from the things that matter to us.

There are two questions that come to my mind when thinking about this quote.

What mistakes am I currently making?

To solve a problem we first have to know what it is. So step one is identifying what mistakes we would like to avoid. Thinking back a couple of days and weeks, I quickly listed a couple things I think are most obvious.

The next obvious question is How can I prevent or at least reduce the chances of that happening? I think a different question might be better:

How is my current environment enabling my mistakes?

Environment is the key influencer of our behavior. We can't eat cupcakes if there are no cupcakes.

It is also the easiest to change. We can use our energy and willpower once to make changes that can serve us for a long time to come.

Here are some ideas for changes:

Some can be simple like:

• Eating too much junk food -> Don't keep junk food in the house
• Spending too much time on the phone -> Set up app time restrictions

There are more advanced ones:

• Playing too many PC games -> Sell the mouse and replace it with a trackpad. Good luck playing games with that thing.

There are also extreme versions:

• Not walking enough -> Sell your car

The extreme versions may be over the top, but they illustrate the point well. If you don't physically have the option to do the thing, you're not going to do the thing. Environment is king when it comes to behavior.

This doesn't solve every problem. But changing the environment can be a powerful and effective first step that is also easy to do.