Mastering the Art of Change
by Leo Babauta
Web edition (paid)
This book, the culmination of Leo's decade of working on Zen Habits, is a concise volume about creating change and finding contentment, inspired by his study of Zen Buddhism. It was brought to reality by a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.
As read: February 2015
- If you could take a magic wand to your life, what would you change? What's stopping you from doing it?
- Mind Movie: thoughts play through our mind like a movie pulling us between instant gratification and longterm goals
- This mental projector creates idealized expectations from fantasy that don't align with reality
- The mind seeks comfort and avoids discomfort, fear, and change
- Fear causes us to avoid and procrastinate on what we really want
- It's the root of any problem we have in life
- This leads to:
- anxiety
- procrastination
- avoiding fulfilling activities like chasing dreams, creative pursuits, and failing at habit change
- Solving it is the key to removing obstacles from our lives
- You can come to associate discomfort with learning and growth (growth mindset)
- "Learning to turn from the Mind Movie to reality, and appreciate reality for what it is, changed my life. I could now act without fear, make changes without procrastination."
- How to form mindful habits to master the skills of discomfort & change, the Zen Habits Method
- Slow change: one step per chapter
- Commit to reading one chapter every day & make one small life change as you read the book
- Prepare yourself to overcome mental resistance in habit change
- Why put effort into change?
- Leo was overweight, smoker, in debt, disorganized, and lacking time for important things in life
- Changing habits helped him get unstuck
- mindfulness, enjoying the process vs. outcomes & goals
- you can change things that make you unhappy
- became happy because he could trust himself, not because he was instantly more productive over night or anything like that
- plenty of frustrations & obstacles, esp. in dealing with people
- the habit of mindfulness
- he attributes his results to learning about change
- Everyone expresses the desire to change something, but many don't actually take the first action to start
- "How committed am I to making a new change and actually starting it in the next week?"
- I am committed to doing it for the purpose of personal development.