8 Atomic Concepts That Will Accelerate Autonomy

The book Atomic Habits has sold over 25 million copies. It’s not a sales book, but it will impact your career more than 90% of sales books. Today’s edition breaks down eight key concepts from the author, James Clear, and how they can help improve the way you think about your sales career.

All visuals courtesy of Go Limitless.

Let’s go!

James Clear's idea is that inspiration can come from both working and waiting, but working is more likely to spark it than waiting.

In other words, if you are actively engaged in proper deep work on things like taking small steps toward progressing a key account each day at standards you can be proud of, you’re more likely to stumble upon new ideas or ways of thinking that can spark inspiration (”Hey, here’s a clear commercial insight I can use with a VP at my key account to take action on our proposal”).

If you’re waiting around for inspiration to strike without actively engaging with your work, it’s less likely to come. Inspiration is not something that comes out of nowhere; it is often the result of focused effort and attention. You create the conditions for inspiration to emerge by putting in the work.

At the same time, however, it's also essential to allow yourself the time and space to let your mind wander and make unexpected connections between the things you’re working hard on. By harmonizing active engagement and periods of recovery and reflection, you can maximize your chances of finding inspiration and creativity in your work.

Rest, including active rest, is a core pillar of my operating system. Some of my best ideas come from long walks and bike rides.

→ Key takeaway: Design your days around harmonizing intentional action on high-value activities while allowing yourself the space for creativity with intentional rest and breaks.

You may have looked around your organization and wondered how elite performers consistently rank at the top of the leaderboard, even as quotas rise.

Those who do it consistently (without luck and windfall accounts) view time differently. They use time to build skills, then skills to deliver value, value to generate revenue, and the money they get paid to free up more time. That’s the flywheel.

Even in the services game, customers don’t care so much about the team's time to implement or deliver a solution; they care about the promised results.

Once you tap into your unique skill stack (something only you can deliver), you create autonomy to put your knowledge and systems to work for you. You begin to say no to more things, have the confidence to run “your business” as you see fit, and work starts to feel like a fun game you get to play every day.

Note: Things don’t necessarily get easier because you’re continually leveling up the challenges you put in front of yourself, but you acquire specific knowledge that makes the things that were once hard a lot faster to get done.

→ Key takeaway: Your measuring stick should focus on value, not the time you spend on any project. That’s how your company and clients will be evaluating you.

A single workday is the single unit for success over the long arc of a year.

Like how compounding interest works in finance to help you accumulate substantial wealth over one, three, five, and ten+ years, the same holds for quality habits. If you want to see where you’ll end up at the end of the year (or a decade), just put a microscope on your daily habits and routines.

Are they something you’re proud of? Would somebody you respect commend you on them?

You choose the standard to operate by. As an active seller, I kept my standards higher than those of everyone around me—my company, manager, teammates, prospects, and clients. But equally important, I also (through work with coaching and a supportive community) kept my self-compassion just a tick higher.

This ensured that when I was my own harshest critic, I could also be a slightly better friend to myself. That kept me sane and consistently running on all cylinders.

→ Key takeaway: “Compound (interest) is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.” (Albert Einstein). The good thing is compounding doesn’t just apply to money—leverage it to amplify your good habits, skills, routines, and knowledge.

Speaking of high standards, as you raise them, it’s essential to keep lowering your expectations. This will widen the opportunity for satisfaction.

Why?

As you progress in your career, you’ll be exposed to the realities of work and life: everyone is still trying to figure it all out. There is no magical unicorn, pot of gold, or utopia at the end of the rainbow.

Suppose you ascend to a certain level or attain a certain status. In that case, you’re not provided answers to any special secrets or given any unnatural superpowers … just a lot of disappointment if you were expecting something that never comes.

After I closed a $6.6M deal in Q3 of 2019, I reached seven-figure earnings in a single year for the first time. What did I feel? A whole lot of emptiness. I took a nap after the deal was done.

I was expecting something that never came. What exactly I was searching for, I don’t know. But I learned I was still the same person as the day before.

It’s why I keep repeating “Human first, Seller second” all the time. You can never escape who you are. You’re in your body and mind for life, so you need to respect that.

This concept also applies to your prospects and clients: get them to raise their ambitions while lowering their expectations for results.

→ Key takeaway: If you want to give yourself (and your clients) the most significant chance for satisfaction, the gap between ambition and expectation should be as large as possible.

Setting ambitious goals is not enough to succeed in the highly competitive SaaS or AI-native market.

Instead, you need to create effective systems and processes that support your targets and enable you to take consistent, deliberate actions that move you closer to them.

For instance, when I increased my income from $200K in 2018 to $1.5M in 2019, I made fundamental changes to my approach—I created a system.

Here’s how I did it.

My goal for that year was to earn $500K, which would’ve been the highest I’d ever earned in my career. I did all the things “you’re supposed to do,” like work backward from the numbers, create S.M.A.R.T. goals, and plot out the small actions I needed to take to make it a reality.

The problem with that is Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion. With a goal of $500K in earnings for the year, I designed my work year to achieve it.

I did this instead, and it worked a lot better:

→ Key takeaway: Goals will expand to fill the time allotted for completion. Developing a system, or set of systems, will help you go further than you can imagine.

Remember “Human first, Seller second?” Yeah, the human you … that’s who people gravitate to.

It’s also the person you have to live with all the time. The seller gets to clock out. Can you look your human self in the mirror and say, “I’m proud of you. I love you. This life is pretty amazing.”

If not, it’s a sign that things are out of whack.

Who are you trying to impress?

If it’s not the person in the mirror or the people who love and respect you, it’s time to go back to step five and rethink (or clearly define) your personal operating principles.

Stuff is just, well, stuff. It doesn’t define who you are or your importance in the world. President’s Club, the MVP award, the title—they won’t matter in a few years.

What’s important is your promise to yourself and those who matter.

→ Key takeaway: Focus on the things that fill the human bucket, not the seller's one. When you do, you’ll impress all the right people, including the most important person— yourself.

Working on your deals, especially those that require more time, can feel like a turbulent stock market.

There may be weeks without meetings, quarters with $0 on the board, and countless emails, Slack messages, and requests for updates. It’s noisy (and irritating).

But just like the stock market, when you zoom out, you no longer just see red. You see the natural peaks and valleys.

What feels like tragedy today will be triumph tomorrow.

The key is to be steady. Stay focused on your system. Keep applying your quality routines and habits so that they compound. Focus on being authentically you and aligned with your bigger purpose in life.

Once you do, you’ll find peace and calm. Use this to guide you through the choppy waters.

→ Key takeaway: You'll get stressed when you stay zoomed in. Stress doesn’t accelerate deals or free up your calendar, so you need to zoom out and maintain the proper long-term perspective. Let staying calm be your compass.

I love telling this story about Jerry Seinfeld.

Folklore has it that when Jerry Seinfeld was starting as a comedian, he used his calendar as a habit tracker to make sure he “never breaks the chain” of writing jokes every day.

James Clear used this example in Atomic Habits and believes “don’t break the chain” is a powerful mantra. But of course, things will happen, and you’ll miss a day. Skip once, ok? Skip twice, not so much.

The key is to make these habits tiny, so you increase your chances of success, rather than relying solely on willpower (which doesn’t work).

Here’s an easy ABC recipe to make them stick:

Example:

Anchor: After I set my coffee down on my desk,

Behavior: I turn on my computer and open the Simple Strategic Selling System.

Celebrate: Smile and say, “Identifying key insights on my Diamond Accounts gives me an unfair advantage.”

→ Key takeaway: Nobody can be perfect, but you can design systems and behaviors by using the visual impact of a habit tracker and keeping habits tiny, so you have the highest chance of sticking to them.

That’s a wrap—see you next time!

P.S. If you liked this, you may benefit from a membership of The Purposeful Performer. There are three options.