Over the years, this column has always been a “help” column, to assist the readers to improve their lives, and be the kind of person they strive to be.

In this book, James Clear, takes the reader through the steps to build good habits and break bad ones. He describes “atomic” as “an extremely small amount of a thing, the single irrevocable unit of a larger system and the source of immense energy and power.” He then describes a “habit” as a routine or practice performed regularly or an automatic response to a specific situation.”

Obviously we have good habits and bad habits. Drinking and drugging that turn into addiction are bad habits, while sobriety and disuse are good habits. What separates one from the other? So, let’s find out.

On the final day of practice for baseball, Clear was hit in the face with a baseball bat that slipped out of a teammate’s hand and hit him square between the eyes. His nose was crushed and the soft tissue of his brain slammed into his skull. He had a broken nose, multiple skull fractures and two shattered eye sockets.

At the hospital, he was unable to give correct answers as to what year it was, who was the president, and what his mother’s name was. This was just the beginning of a treacherous recovery. His body began shutting down. He stopped breathing altogether, and was put on oxygen and began having post traumatic seizures. Finally he was put into a medically induced coma and placed on a ventilator.

The following months were hard. He had double vision. Between the vision problems, operations and seizures, it took eight months for him to drive again. It was at this time that James learned about habits.

While his peers at Denison College stayed up late playing video games, he went to bed early each night and made it a point to keep his room neat. These improvements were minor, but the whole point of “atomic habits” is to start small and keep chipping away at whatever you are doing. Let me repeat that a habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly.

Case in point, Clear made it a habit to lift weights three times weekly, and in following years, his 6-foot-4 frame bulked up from 170 to 200 pounds. We all face challenges in life. His traumatic injury was Jim’s.

At Denison University, six years after being hit in the face with a baseball bat, Jim was named to the All-Academic ESPN All-American Team, given to only 33 student athletes in the country. You may wonder why I have spent so much of this article giving you Jim’s background and accomplishments. How did he do this? His wasn’t an overnight success from a medically induced coma to Academic All-American. It was a gradual evolution, a long series of small wins and tiny breakthroughs. If you’ve read this column over the years for REBT, I have often stated that true success is painful and diligent. No pain, no gain, thus the only way that Jim made progress was to start small at anything he did.

The best thing about this method is that you can use it for “anything,” to name a few like teaching, coaching, counseling, sales, relationships,parenting, self-improvement, philosophy, psychology, etc. In other words, the habits that you wish to develop more and discard those that are keeping you stagnant.

REBT stresses changing your thinking. If you are experiencing difficulty in addiction, what you think or tell yourself translates to feelings such as mad, sad, glad, and eventually leads to appropriate behavior or inappropriate behavior. Jim talks about the 1% rule. Namely if a person can improve by 1% daily at whatever they are trying to accomplish, and this is really hardly noticeable, but in the long run it can be far more meaningful. If you can get 1% 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% worse each day for one year, you’ll decline down to zero. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. Let me give you an example.

When I was coaching high school and college basketball, my big men were 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-5 in high school and 6-foot-10 or 7 feet in college and were taught the same big man drills daily, but on a 1% level. First was footwork, catching the ball without dropping it, then bumping or pressing your defender, then drop-stepping and sealing your defender off. As you can see, this took weeks, and in some cases years for players to start to do this automatically.

Thus it doesn’t matter how successful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you in the path to success. In other words, you get what you repeat, even though it may be small. I’ll give you another example. In sales, it averages out to eighteen calls on account in order to get the first order. Some are less, some are more. A rule in sales is “if you are not going to make the second call, don’t make the first.” Starting small, 1%, setting a schedule or habit going back on the same day at the same time weekly, will produce good results. I can back this up because I have been an over-the-road salesperson for 44 years, and at 83 years old, I work 40 to 50 hours weekly. All due to 1% and starting small to master anything requires patience. I’ll give you another example.

The San Antonio Spurs are one of the most successful teams in NBA history (National Basketball Association). They have a quote in their locker room that goes like this, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at a rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know it was not that it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” Golfers are not born, but made. Jack Nicklaus used to to hit 500 to 1,000 shots daily. Ben Hogan said,”You find your game in the dirt.” Again, small starts for great gains later.

Next month: The plateau of latent (hidden) potential.

Mike Tramuta, is a Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy counselor. He can be reached at 716-983-1592