CMP Review 2024-09-12

September 12, 2024

When I first heard about the Book of Centuries, I fell in love with the idea. I immediately made it a goal for everyone in my family to each keep one. There was just one problem, best stated by James Clear:

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear exposes the problem I ran into: “We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results.”

Because I never changed the system, I never got the results. So I felt like a failure.

I thought, as many people do, that when we came across an interesting date in a history lesson, we would get out our Books of Centuries and make entries. But we didn’t. Many PNEU programmes say that the Book of Centuries is a Sunday occupation. But I wonder how many families are thinking about schoolwork on Sunday. Are you?

Relying on inspiring moments and Sunday occupations resulted for us in books of empty pages. I took a hard look at my system. The answer for my family was to add an explicit entry to our timetable every week for work on our Books of Centuries. One entry a week doesn’t seem like much. It seems like a microscopic investment. An atomic investment.

“At first, these tiny routines seem insignificant,” explains James Clear, “but soon they build on each other and fuel bigger wins that multiply to a degree that far outweighs the cost of their initial investment.” And the gain for me turned out to be not just a busy notebook. It turned out to be a new relationship with history.

@artmiddlekauff