Atomic Habits

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3 Sentence Summary

Atomic Habits gives you a step-by-step system for improvement, whether your goals center on health, money, productivity, relationships, or all of the above. Learn how to start new habits, break old ones, and maintain consistency long enough to see the results. James Clear’s book is a valuable resource, full of useful examples and templates, that make the science of human behavior change interesting and immediately applicable to your life.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Fall in love with boredom. Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
2. Trust the process. Goals set directions; systems make progress.
3. You are what you do. Improvement are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
4. Disciplined people design their environment to work for them. They structure their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control.
5. Start with repetition, not perfection. A habit must be established before it can be improved.

Atomic Habits Summary

Atomic Habits Resources

• The Habit Loop
• The Habits Cheat Sheet
• Key Questions and Answers
• Personality Tests
• The Habits Scorecard Template
• Implementation Intentions Template
• Habit Stacking Template
• Habit Tracker Template
• Habit Contract Template

The Fundamentals

1. The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

• It’s easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.
• 1% better every day for a year = 1.01³⁶⁵ = 38

• Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
• Be more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
• Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.
• Time magnifies the margin between success and failure.

• Meaningful habits must persist long enough to break through the Plateau of Latent Potential.
• When you finally get through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success.

Forget About Goals, Focus On Systems Instead

• Goals are the results you want to achieve. Systems are the processes that lead to those results.
• Goals set directions. Systems make progress.
• Fall in love with the process, not the end result.
• You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

2. How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (And Vice Versa)

• Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way.

Three Layers of Behavior Change

1. Change your results/outcomes.
2. Change your process/habits/systems.
3. Change your identity/beliefs about yourself.

• An old identity can sabotage your plans for changing behavior.
• Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.
• 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.
• Improvement are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
• Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.

The Two-Step Process To Changing Your Identity

1. Decide the type of person you want to be.
2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

• Your habits are how you embody your identity.
• You become who you want to be through your habits.
• As you repeat a habit, the evidence accumulates and your self-image begins to change.
• Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
• The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.

3. How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

• Habits are just a series of automatic solutions that solve the problems and stresses you face regularly.
• As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases.
• Habits create freedom to focus on higher leverage activities.
• Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future.

The Science of How Habits Work

• Building a new habit is a four step process: Cue, craving, response, and reward.
• The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior.
• Cravings are the motivational force that give us reason to act.
• The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action.
• The reward is the end goal that satisfies the craving.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change

1. Make it obvious (Cue)
2. Make it attractive (Craving)
3. Make it easy (Response)
4. Make it satisfying (Reward)

You can invert these laws to break a bad habit:

1. Make it invisible
2. Make it unattractive
3. Make it difficult
4. Make it unsatisfying

The 1st Law: Make It Obvious

4. The Man Who Didn’t Look Right

• You don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin.
• For this reason, you must begin the process of behavior change with awareness.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Carl Jung

Habits Scorecard

• Make a list of your daily habits.
• As yourself if each habit is positive, negative, or neutral (this will depend on your goals).
• A helpful question is, “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be?”
• The purpose the Habits Scorecard is to simply recognize your habits and acknowledge the cues that trigger them, which makes it possible to respond in a way that benefits you.

5. The Best Way to Start A New Habit

• Use an implementation intention which is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act.
• Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
• The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
• When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.

Habit Stacking: A Simple Plan to Overhaul Your Habits

• Diderot Effect: Obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
• 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.
• After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].

6. Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

• People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.
• Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.
• Suggestion Impulse Buying: When a shopper sees a product for the first time and visualizes a need for it. In other words, customers occasionally buy products not because the want them but because of how they are presented to them. For example, items placed on the shelf at eye level tend to be purchased more than those down near the floor.
• Vision is our most powerful/influential sense.
• A small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do.

How to Design Your Environment For Success

• Habits can be easier to change in a new environment.
• Create a separate space for work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. One space, one use.

7. The Secret to Self-Control

• “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.
• Create a disciplined environment.
• Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feelings they try to numb.
• You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad.
• One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
• Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.

The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive

8. How To Make A Habit Irresistible

• We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
• Dopamine is released no only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.
• The expectation of a rewarding experience is what motivates us to act in the first place.
• Premack’s Principle: More probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.

9. The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

• Behaviors are attractive when they help us fit in.
• We are influenced by (1) The Close, (2) The Many, and (3) The Powerful.

Imitating the Close

• We pick up habits from the people around us.
• The closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.
• Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
• Surround yourself with people who have habits you want to have yourself.
• Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
• When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you.

Imitating the Many

• Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior.
• There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group.
• Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.

Imitating the Powerful

• We are attracted to behavior that can get us approval, respect, and praise.
• We are also motivated to avoid behaviors that would lower our status.

10. How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

• Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use.
• Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings.

How to Reprogram Your Brian to Enjoy Hard Habits

• You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience.
• You don’t “have” to. You “get” to.
• Shift from seeing burdens to seeing opportunities.

• Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.

The 3rd Law: Make It Easy

11. Walk Slowly, But Never Backward

The best is the enemy of the good.

voltaire

• There’s a difference between motion and taking action. Motion is when you’re planning, strategizing, and learning. Action is the type of behavior that delivers an outcome.
• Sometimes motion is useful. But more often than not, we prefer motion to action because we like to feel like we’re making progress without the risk of failure.
• Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done.
• If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.
• Habits are formed based on frequency, not time.
• “How long does it to form new habit?” Wrong question. The right question is, “How many does it take to form a new habit?”

12. The Law of Least Effort

• 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.
• The idea behind make it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.

How to Achieve More With Less Effort

• Practice environmental design.
• The most habit-forming products and services do the best job of removing little bits of friction from your life.
• Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.
• Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.

13. How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

• Estimated 40-50% of our actions are done out of habit.
• Habits are automatic choices that influence the conscious decisions that follow.
• A split second decision in one moment can dictate your behavior for hours afterwards. In this way, habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway.

• Two-Minute Rule: When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.
• Pare down new habits until they become incredibly easy to do. E.g. “Read before bed every night” becomes “Read one page.”
• The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start.
• Once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it.
• Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes.
• A habit must be established before it can be improved.
• If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details.
• Standardize before you optimize.

14. How to make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

• Commitment Device: A choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.
• 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.
• When you automate as much of your life as possible, you can spend your effort on the tasks machines cannot do yet.

The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying

15. The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change

• Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
• We don’t just want any type of satisfaction. We desire immediate satisfaction.
• Our brains prefer quick payoffs to long-term sacrifices.
• The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
• As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.
• If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff.
• The last mile is always the least crowded.
• Habits need to feel successful—even if it’s just in a small way—if you want them to stick.
• The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through.
• Incentives start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
• Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.

16. How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

• Paper Clip Strategy: Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or marbles from one jar into another—provide clear evidence of your progress.
• Use a habit tracker and don’t break the streak.

• Habit trackers also keep you honest. Measurement offers one way t overcome our blindness to our own behavior and notice what’s really going on each day.
• Manual tracking should be limited to your most important habits.
• Perfection isn’t possible. Better to keep a simple rule: Never miss twice.
• Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
• 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.
• Be careful when tracking not to be motivated by the number rather than the purpose behind the habit.
• We optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.
• Goodharts Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
• Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing. And just because you can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not important at all.

17. How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

• The more immediate and more costly a mistake is, the faster you will learn from it.
• The strength of the punishment must match the relative strength of the behavior it is trying to correct.
• 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.

Advanced Tactics

18. The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)

• The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
• Genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
• Build habits that work for your personality.
• Shape your exercise habits around your interests.
• Read whatever fascinates you.
• Habits need to be enjoyable if they are going to stick.
• If you can’t find a game where the odds are in your favor, create one.
• When you can’t win by being better, win by being different.
• By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easer to stand out.
• Try specializing. Even if you’re not the most naturally gifted, you can often win by being the best in a very narrow category.
• Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.
• People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.
• Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.

“Big 5” Personality Traits

The most proven scientific analysis of personality traits is known as the “Big 5,” which breaks them down into five spectrums of behavior.

1. Openness to experience: from curious and inventive on one end to cautious and consistent on the other.
2. Conscientiousness: organized and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous.
3. Extroversion: outgoing and energetic to solitary and resrved.
4. Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached.
5. Neuroticism: anxious and sensitive to confident, calm, and stable.

How to Find A Game Where the Odds Are In Your Favor

• Explore and exploit.
• In the beginning, cast a wide net. Try many different possibilities.
• Then shift your focus to the best solution, while still occasionally experimenting.
• If you’re winning—exploit. If you’re losing—explore.

Questions to help narrow your focus

• What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
• What makes me lose track of time?
• Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
• What comes naturally to me?

19. The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

• The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.
• Goldilocks Rule: Humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.
• Without variety, we get bored.
• Boredom is the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.
• Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.

Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.

Machiavelli

• Learn 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.
• Professionals step up even when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so. That’s what makes them better than an amateur.

20. The Downside of Creating Good Habits

• Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.

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.

Pat Riley

• 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.
• A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.

Annual Review

• Tally all your habits for the year (if the results are measurable).
• Reflect on progress by answering three questions:

1. What went well this year?
2. What didn’t go so well this year?
3. What did I learn?

Integrity Report

• Answer these questions halfway through the year:

1. What are the core values that drive my life and work?
2. How am I living and working with integrity right now?
3. How can I set a higher standard in the future?

Conclusion

• Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.
• 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.

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