2. CHAPTER 1, Part 2

 WHY SMALL HABITS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, 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.
Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable— sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.

1% BETTER EVERY DAY
1% worse every day for one year. 0.99365 = 00.03
1% better every day for one year. 1.01365 = 37.78

The effects of small habits compound over time. For example, if you can get just 1 percent better each day, you’ll end up with results that are nearly 37 times better after one year.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment. If you save a little money now, you’re still not a millionaire. If you go to the gym three days in a row, you’re still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven’t learned the language. We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous routines.
Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you. If you procrastinate and put your project off until tomorrow, there will usually be time to finish it later. A single decision is easy to dismiss.
But when we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there— that eventually leads to a problem.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet— but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.*
Similarly, a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
That said, it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. If you’re a millionaire but you spend more than you earn each month, then you’re on a bad trajectory. If your spending habits don’t change, it’s not going to end well. Conversely, if you’re broke, but you save a little bit every month, then you’re on the path toward financial freedom—even if you’re moving slower than you’d like.
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.
If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line. Are you spending less than you earn each month? Are you making it into the gym each week? Are you reading books and learning something new each day? Tiny battles like these are the ones that will define your future self.
Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up, which is why understanding the details is crucial. You need to know how habits work and how to design them to your liking, so you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade.

1. The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

 The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

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. In 110 years, no British cyclist had ever won the event.
In fact, the performance of British riders had been so underwhelming that one of the top bike manufacturers in Europe refused to sell bikes to the team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw the Brits using their gear.
Brailsford had been hired to put British Cycling on a new trajectory. What made him different from previous coaches was his relentless commitment to a strategy that he referred to as “the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do. Brailsford said, “The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”
Brailsford and his coaches began by making small adjustments you might expect from a professional cycling team. They redesigned the bike seats to make them more comfortable and rubbed alcohol on the tires for a better grip. They asked riders to wear electrically heated overshorts to maintain ideal muscle temperature while riding and used biofeedback sensors to monitor how each athlete responded to a particular workout. The team tested various fabrics in a wind tunnel and had their outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits, which proved to be lighter and more aerodynamic.
But they didn’t stop there. Brailsford and his team continued to find 1 percent improvements in overlooked and unexpected areas. They tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest muscle recovery. They hired a surgeon to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the chances of catching a cold. They determined the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night’s sleep for each rider. They even painted the inside of the team truck white, which helped them spot little bits of dust that would normally slip by unnoticed but could degrade the performance of the finely tuned bikes.
As these and hundreds of other small improvements accumulated, the results came faster than anyone could have imagined.
Just five years after Brailsford took over, the British Cycling team dominated the road and track cycling events at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, where they won an astounding 60 percent of the gold medals available. Four years later, when the Olympic Games came to London, the Brits raised the bar as they set nine Olympic records and seven world records.
That same year, Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France. The next year, his teammate Chris Froome won the race, and he would go on to win again in 2015, 2016, and 2017, giving the British team five Tour de France victories in six years.
During the ten-year span from 2007 to 2017, British cyclists won 178 world championships and sixty-six Olympic or Paralympic gold medals and captured five Tour de France victories in what is widely regarded as the most successful run in cycling history.*
How does this happen? How does a team of previously ordinary athletes transform into world champions with tiny changes that, at first glance, would seem to make a modest difference at best? Why do small improvements accumulate into such remarkable results, and how can you replicate this approach in your own life?

Born To Work

Child Labour in India

India! “The fastest growing economy” that’s what comes in our mind, when we speak of India but it is unfortunately only one side.

In India we can see some of the richest men in the world with the biggest industries. But on the other hand we can also see some of the poorest communities of the world. These communities can hardly make their living; they don’t earn even a dollar despite of their hard work.

The children of these communities are the most effected, they face a very tough life right from their child hood. They are not lucky enough to be cared in their tender ages. These children have to pay a huge price for their existence.

Child labour is at its peak in India despite hollow slogans from the Indian government. There are millions of children under the age of 14 who are working only to survive. They work for food, they work to be alive. The main reason behind child labour is poverty and growing population adds fuel to it.

These children are working everywhere. Some have to beg, some have to polish shoes, some have to collect waste materials, some are working in homes, some are working at heavy construction sites and some are working in factories, industries and mines in very unsafe conditions.

From premature age, they are forced to work at very low wages and sometimes for nothing. The majority of these children have no choice but to work. They are being exploited wherever they work.

When our children are having breakfast; they have to search for food.

When our children prepare for school; they prepare for work.

When our children are holding a pencil in school; at the same time they hold hammers, stones, wastages, pushcarts...

When our children are having lunch; they have nothing to eat or sometimes not enough to fill up their stomach.

When our children return happily from school after learning; they return miserably with kicks, cuts, wounds and harassments.

When our children sleep at home under the arms of parents; they sleep with dogs and diseases on roads under the open sky without knowing what will happen to them today or tomorrow.

The only question they ask is, “why have we BORN?”...

 

Zahid Qayoom Bhat

PATTAN IN HISTORY

Sankaragaurisvar Temple Pattan

Pattan is a small town located on Srinagar Muzafarabad national highway and it is some 27 KMTR’S north of Srinagar .In Kalhana’s Rajtarangni town Pattan is written as “Shankarpora Pattan”. Later Shanankarpora Pattan came to known as “Pattan”. In Sanscrit ‘Pattan’ means ‘water body’. During the kingdom of King Sankarverman, Pattan was the capital of Kashmir.

Pattan was a business centre for wool, livestock and grains. There was a lack of ground routes. So, maximum transportation took place through the water. As Pattan was situated near a water body, it was considered an important business centre.

Parihaspora Pattan

The Sugandesh and Sankaragaurisvar temples located in Pattan (locally known as Paandav Larie) were constructed by King Sankerverman. The temples are about 300 meters apart; both are declared as protected monuments by Archaeological survey of India. King Sankerverman demolished some old temples at Parihaspora and constructed two new temples at Pattan. King Sankerverman copied his father King Avantivarman, who had constructed similar temples at Awantipora.  An interesting point about the temples is that, how they (Pandav) managed to move these massive stones from one place to another? Perhaps they used large logs of wood within water to shift these stones to their respective locations for the construction of temples.

Ruins of   Sugandesh Temple Pattan

Sugandesh temple is at the entry point of town Pattan and Sankaragaurisvar is in the centre of town surrounded by chinars. These temples have a base of about ten feet below the ground. The big stones used in the construction of these temples might have been brought from Manasbal or some adjoining areas.

The Sikh-Nag Pattan

In the northern part of these temples, there was a lake known as “Pumbe Sar” (Lotus Lake). Today there now stands a residential area.

Within the foot-steps of higher secondary Pattan is an ancient spring, designed mysteriously containing some old sculptures, known as “Sikh Naag”. It was discovered during the regime of Maharaja Pratap Singh.

These historical monuments should not only be protected but they should be maintained from time to time. But unfortunately these monuments are a victim of negligence by the archaeological departments of India.  If these buildings are not repaired, there destruction is not away.

Zahid Qayoom Bhat                                                                                         

Fading culture of Houk sun

Zahid Qayoom Bhat

Mohammad Shafi, along with his wife, was cutting some vegetables into small pieces. Then they spread these vegetable pieces all around the lawn and left them for drying.

Shafi is used to this practice since his childhood. “We dry vegetables and use them in winter because there is scarcity of fresh vegetables in winter,” says 70-years-old Shafi.

These dried vegetables are locally known as “houk-sun”.

“In early winter days, there used to be heavy snowfall in winters Kashmir valley. All the agricultural activity stopped. Jhelum Valley Road, now known as Srinagar-Muzafarabad Road was the only link for the valley to the outside world. This road was blocked as soon as snow mounted up due to which import of food items, especially fresh vegetables, from Rawalpindi was also stopped. Then people used these dry vegetables from November to March,” says 67-year-old Abdul Aziz.

“The dry vegetables also keep us warm in winter,” he adds.

The mostly used dry vegetables were Wangan Hache (dried brinjal), Ale Hache (dried bottle gourd), Ruwagan Hache (dried tomato), Gogji Hache (dried turnip), Vapal Hak and Hund (dried jungle herbs), Bumb (a long dried vegetable found in marshy lands) and Huch Palak (dried spinach).

Besides these dry vegetables, some cereals and pulses were also consumed in winters such as Wari Muth (black gram), Razmah Dal (red gram), Mong Dal (green gram), Matar (dried peas), Chana (gram), Grim Dal (beans), Makai Aout (maize flour), Kinke Aout (wheat flour) and even Huggard (a small dried fish).

The tradition of using and preparing these dry vegetables was very common in Kashmir and continued until next cultivation. However, things changed after 1947. Tribesmen from Pakistan attacked Kashmir. Jhelum Valley Road was closed and construction of Jawahar Tunnel was initiated in 1950. Kashmir was now connected to rest of India through this 2.5 km long tunnel, which became operational since 22 December 1956.

Transportation became better after 1960. Now fresh vegetables and other food items were easily imported into Kashmir. People here gave up the traditional practices and became very dependent on other states for their agricultural needs.

Besides, advancement in agriculture like hybrid seeds and fertilizers made the valley self self-sufficient to some extent

“From being self-sufficient we have been rendered entirely dependent on other states. We have turned ourselves from kings to slaves,” says Abdul Aziz a traditional farmer.