"Atomic Habits" James Clear
It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop.
Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
The quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
A very small shift in direction can lead to a very meaningful change in destination.
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
We often expect progress to be linear. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done.
Forget about goals, focus on systems instead.
If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from losers.
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.
Goals restrict your happiness.
The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.
Furthermore, goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment.
When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.
True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking.
How your habits shape your identity.
Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.
It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behaviour.
The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes a part of your identity. The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
True behaviour change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.
Whatever your identity is right now, you only believe it because you have proof of it.
Meaningful change does not require radical change.
The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.
The focus should always be on becoming a particular type of person, not getting a particular outcome.
Behaviours followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.
Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time. As a result, your brain is always working to preserve your conscious attention for whatever task is most essential. Whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the nonconscious mind to do automatically.
If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks - when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills - then you have less time for freedom. It’s only by making fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.
Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones.
The more automatic a behaviour becomes, the less likely we are to consciously think about it. And when we’ve done something a thousand times before, we begin to overlook things. We assume that the next time will be just like the last. We’re so used to doing what we’ve always done that we don’t stop to question whether it’s the right thing to do at all. Many of our failures in performance are largely attributable to a lack of self-awareness.
People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
Many people think they lack motivation but what they really lack is clarity.
Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course.
Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit.
Motivation is overrated. Environment often matters more.
People often choose products not because of what they are but because of where they are. Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you.
The more obviously available a product or service is, the more likely you are to try it.
Many of the actions we take each day are shaped not by purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.
Given that we are more dependent on vision than on any other sense, it should come as no surprise that visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior. For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do.
Unfortunately, the environments where we live and work often make it easy not to do certain actions because there is no obvious cue to trigger the behavior.
When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.
By comparison, creating obvious visual cues can draw your attention toward a desired habit.
If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.
Habits can be easier to change in a new environment. Go to a new place—a different coftee shop, a bench in the park, a corner of your room you seldom use—and create a new routine there. It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues.
When you can't manage to get to an entirely new environment, redefine or rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find useful is "One space, one use."
Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another. When you start mixing contexts, you'll start mixing habits— and the easier ones will usually win out.
You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks, which makes it a powerful device. But when you can use your phone to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task. You want to be productive, but you're also conditioned to browse social media, check email, and play video games whenever you open your phone.
If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.
“Disciplined" people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
Scientists have found that showing addicts a picture of cocaine for just thirty-three milliseconds stimulates the reward pathway in the brain and sparks desire. This speed is too fast for the brain to consciously register-the addicts couldn't even tell you what they had seen—but they craved the drug all the same. Here's the punch line: You can break a habit, but you're unlikely to forget it.
Humans are also prone to fall for exaggerated versions of reality. Junk food, for example, drives our reward systems into a frenzy. After spending hundreds of thousands of years hunting and foraging for food in the wild, the human brain has evolved to place a high value on salt, sugar, and fat. Such foods are often calorie-dense and they were quite rare when our ancient ancestors were roaming the savannah.
Placing a high value on salt, sugar, and fat is no longer advantageous to our health, but the craving persists because the brain's reward centers have not changed for approximately fifty thousand years.
With natural, unprocessed foods, you tend to experience the same sensations over and over-how's that seventeenth bite of kale taste? After a few minutes, your brain loses interest and you begin to feel full. But foods that are high in dynamic contrast keep the experience novel and interesting, encouraging you to eat more.
We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.
We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behaviour is the normal behaviour. Your culture sets your expectation for what is “normal.” Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself.
We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe) and the powerful (those with status and prestige).
The normal behaviour of the tribe often overpowers the desired behaviour of the individual. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience. Sometimes, all you need is a slight mind-set shift. For instance, we often talk about everything we have to do in a given day. Now, imagine changing just one word: You don’t “have” to. You “get” to. The key point is that both versions of reality are true.
Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive.
It is easy to get bogged down trying to find optimal plan for change. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking actions. I refer to this as the difference between being in motion and taking action. When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategising and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. We do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure. And that’s the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure. Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something.
If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. Simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit. Habits form based on frequency, not time.
One of the most common questions I hear is, “How long does it take to build a new habit?” But what people really should be asking is, “How many does it take to form a new habit?”
The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.
Focus on taking action, not being in motion.
Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really wanted it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. Out of all possible actions we could take, the one that is realised is the one that delivers the most value for the least effort. We act motivated to what is easy.
Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life.
When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do. The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. This is a powerful strategy because one you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it. A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. The point is to master a habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. Make it easy to start and the rest will follow. It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard. The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
The average person spends over two hours per day on social media. What could you do with an extra six hundred hours per year?
What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided. You learn what to do in the future based on what you were rewarded for doing (or punished for doing) in the past. Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.
Similar to other animals on the African savannah, our ancestors spend their days responding to grave threats, securing the next meal, and taking shelter from a storm. It made sense to place a high value on instant gratification. The distant future was less of a concern. And after thousands of generations is an immediate-return environment, our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones.
The consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate.
The brain’s tendency to prioritise the present moment means you can’t rely on good intentions.
To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful - even if it’s in a small way.
Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures - like moving paper clips, or hairpins or marbles - provide clear evidence of your progress.
The mere act of tracking a behaviour can spark the urge to change it.
Most of us have a distorted view of our behaviour. We think we act better than we do. When the evidence is right in front of you, you’re less likely to lie to yourself.
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is a start of new habit.
Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.
The secret to maximising your odds of success is to choose the right filed of competition. The people at the top of any competitive field are not only well trained, they are also well suited to the task. And this is why, if you want to be truly great, selecting the right place to focus is crucial.
People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.
One of the most consistent findings is that the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty”. The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty. The Goldilocks Rules states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
To achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability.
No habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom. The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over.
Stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur. Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
Sustaining an effort is the most important thing for any enterprise. The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time.