🔍 The Book in 3 Sentences
- Leveraging habits isn’t about adding more to your life because you are more productive. It’s to help set guardrails for who you want to be/are.
- Creating habits should be done in a way to make them easy to start and easy to sustain.
- Creating habits help you create an environment where you are more likely to win, whatever your definition of winning is.
💭 Impressions
Why I choose this book
This is one of those books that I choose because so many people recommend it. I also wanted to see how a topic that is seemingly so small could be talked about at length and how the author did it.
👨🎓 What the book taught me
💡 How my life / behavior / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.
- I’ve used a Habit Tracker for years now. There are times when it feels burdensome. This book taught me that habits should be easy to start, easy to sustain, should fit your personality, and should align with your goals. Don’t form habits just to form them.
🎙️ My Top 3 Quotes
- Learning to play a game where the odds are in your favor is critical for maintaining motivation and feeling successful.
- When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out.
- Happiness is simply the absence of desire.
📒 Summary + Notes
changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
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. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.
an atomic habit refers to a tiny change, a marginal gain, a 1 percent improvement. But atomic habits are not just any old habits, however small. They are little habits that are part of a larger system.
The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
“Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be?
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The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
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One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.
Instead, “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.
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the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
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Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.
At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and approval, or to achieve status.
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You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience.
Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain.
habits form based on frequency, not time.
New habits require the same level of frequency. You need to string together enough successful attempts until the behavior is firmly embedded in your mind and you cross the Habit Line.
But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient.
Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible.
It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.*
Every action requires a certain amount of energy. The more energy required, the less likely it is to occur.
You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers.
This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it.
One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design.
Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.
If you look at the most habit-forming products, you’ll notice that one of the things these goods and services do best is remove little bits of friction from your life.
Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy.
You can also invert this principle and prime the environment to make bad behaviors difficult.
Researchers estimate that 40 to 50 percent of our actions on any given day are done out of habit.
It seems to be easier to continue what you are already doing than to start doing something different.
Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments. The moment you decide between ordering takeout or cooking dinner. The moment you choose between driving your car or riding your bike.
“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.
The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work.
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.
We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying.
Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating.
What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time.
immediate-return environment because your actions instantly deliver clear and immediate outcomes.
delayed-return environment because you can work for years before your actions deliver the intended payoff.
time inconsistency. That is, the way your brain evaluates rewards is inconsistent across time.*
You value the present more than the future.
Once you understand how the brain prioritizes rewards, the answers become clear: the consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate.
The French economist Frédéric Bastiat explained the problem clearly when he wrote, “It almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa.
The ending of any experience is vital because we tend to remember it more than other phases. You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying.
The best approach is to use reinforcement, which refers to the process of using an immediate reward to increase the rate of a behavior.
Reinforcement ties your habit to an immediate reward, which makes it satisfying when you finish.
It is worth noting that it is important to select short-term rewards that reinforce your identity rather than ones that conflict with it.
You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you.
Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress.
Visual measurement comes in many forms: food journals, workout logs, loyalty punch cards, the progress bar on a software download, even the page numbers in a book.
But perhaps the best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.
A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit. The most basic format is to get a calendar and cross off each day you stick with your routine.
Research has shown that people who track their progress on goals like losing weight, quitting smoking, and lowering blood pressure are all more likely to improve than those who don’t.
Tracking can become its own form of reward.
Habit tracking also helps keep your eye on the ball: you’re focused on the process rather than the result.
If I miss one day, I try to get back into it as quickly as possible.
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows.
when successful people fail, they rebound quickly.
The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.
The human mind wants to “win” whatever game is being played.
In short, we optimize for what we measure.
Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you.
Just as we are more likely to repeat an experience when the ending is satisfying, we are also more likely to avoid an experience when the ending is painful.
To be productive, the cost of procrastination must be greater than the cost of action.
Just as governments use laws to hold citizens accountable, you can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable.
A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don’t follow through. Then you find one or two people to act as your accountability partners and sign off on the contract with you.
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
Habits are easier to perform, and more satisfying to stick with, when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities.
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.
In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
The takeaway is that you should build habits that work for your personality.*
Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.
Learning to play a game where the odds are in your favor is critical for maintaining motivation and feeling successful.
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People who are talented in a particular area tend to be more competent at that task and are then praised for doing a good job. They stay energized because they are making progress where others have failed, and because they get rewarded with better pay and bigger opportunities, which not only makes them happier but also propels them to produce even higher-quality work.
If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.
What feels like fun to me, but work to others? The mark of whether you are made for a task is not whether you love it but whether you can handle the pain of the task easier than most people.
What makes me lose track of time?
Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
What comes naturally to me?
When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out.
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Even if you’re not the most naturally gifted, you can often win by being the best in a very narrow category.
In summary, one of the best ways to ensure your habits remain satisfying over the long-run is to pick behaviors that align with your personality and skills. Work hard on the things that come easy.
The Goldilocks Rule 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.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
When you know the simple movements so well that you can perform them without thinking, you are free to pay attention to more advanced details.
as a habit becomes automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback.
In fact, some research has shown that once a skill has been mastered there is usually a slight decline in performance over time.
Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement.
Each December, I perform an Annual Review, in which I reflect on the previous year.
Six months later, when summer rolls around, I conduct an Integrity Report.
I use it as a time to revisit my core values and consider whether I have been living in accordance with them.
Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting—even
The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them.
The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements. It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop.
Awareness comes before desire.
Happiness is simply the absence of desire.
It is the idea of pleasure that we chase.
Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems.
With a big enough why you can overcome any how.
Emotions drive behavior.
We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional.
Your response tends to follow your emotions.
Suffering drives progress.
Your actions reveal how badly you want something.
Our expectations determine our satisfaction.
The pain of failure correlates to the height of expectation.
Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance.
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