ATOMIC HABITS - James Clear

 

The Fundamentals - Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference

• Four-step model of habits - cue (signal), craving (envie débordante), response and reward.
• Stimulus, response, reward.
• Cue, routine, reward.

The surprising power of Atomic Habits

• The aggregation of marginal gains.
• The effects of small habits compound over time.
• Success is the product of daily habits not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
• You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
• The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.
• The more you help others, the more others want to help you.
• Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
• It is not until months or years later that we realise the true value of the previous works we have done.
• Forget about goals, focus on systems instead.
• Relaxing more and worrying less.
• Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
• If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
• A system of continuous small improvements.
• 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.
• The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
• You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

• Exercise, meditation, journaling.
• Developing a meditation practice.
• Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do.
• You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.
• The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when habit becomes 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.
• The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
• Habits are the paths to changing your identity.
• Your goal is simply to win the majority of time.
• Your habits change your identity, and your identity shapes your habits.
• The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome.
• Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?

How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

• Behaviours followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.
• Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future.
• Today, we spend most of our time learning cues that predict secondary rewards like money and fame, power and status, praise and approval, love and friendship, or a sense of personal satisfaction.
• The thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the observer are what transform a cue into a craving.
• The first purpose of rewards is to satisfy your cravings.
• As you go about your life, your sensory nervous system is continuously monitoring which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure.
• All behaviour is driven by a desire to solve a problem.
• How can I make it obvious?
• How can I make it attractive?
• How can I make it easy?
• How can I make it satisfying?
• Why don’t I do what I say I’m going to do?

The 1st Law - Make it obvious

The Man Who Didn’t Look Right

• Many of our failures in performance are largely attributable to a lack of self-awareness.
• Does this behaviour help me become the type of person I wish to be?
• If you waste time online, notice that you are spending your life in a way that you do not want to.

The Best Way to Start a New Habit

• Implementation intention, which is the plan you make beforehand about when and where to act.
• People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
• I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME]in [LOCATION].
• Meditation: I will meditate for one minute at 7 a.m. in my kitchen.
• Exercise: I will exercise for one hour at 5 p.m. in my local gym.
• We often say yes to little requests because we are not clear enough about what we need to be doing instead.
• The tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
• It’s a chain of purchases.
• Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.
• 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.
• Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit.
• Strategies like implementation intentions and habit staking are among the most practical ways to create obvious cues for your habits and design a clear plan for when and where to take actions.

Motivation is overrated; Environment Often Matters More

• Environment is the invisible hands that shapes the human behaviour.
• Every habit is context dependent.
• Suggestion Impulse Buying: customers will occasionally buy products not because they want them but because of how they are presented to them.
• You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.
• When their energy use was obvious to track, people changed their behaviour.
• Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
• The context is the cue.
• Their brains learned that sleeping - not browsing on their phones, not watching television, not staring at the clock - was the only action that happened in that room.
• 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 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.
• Every habit should have a home.

The Secret to Self-Control

• So, yes, perseverance, grit and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
• “Cue-induced-wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit.
• You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.
• In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in.
• Remove a single cue and the entire habit often fades away.
• Your energy would be better spent optimising your environment. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

The 2ND Law - Make it attractive

How to Make a Habit Irresistible

• The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.
• We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
• Our goal is to learn how to make our habits irresistible.
• Without dopamine, desire died.
• Without desire, action stopped.
• The average slot machine player will spin the wheel six hundred times per hour.
• Every behaviour that is highly habit-forming - browsing social media - is associated with higher levels of dopamine.
• Dopamine plays a central role in many neurological processes, including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion, and voluntary management.
• Desire is the engine that drives behaviour.
• Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
• After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT]

1. After I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees (need)
2. After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook (want)

• Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

• Charles Darwin: “In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”.
• Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe.
• Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behaviour.
• We check reviews on Amazon or Yelp or TripAdvisor because we want to imitate the “best” buying, eating and travel habits. It’s usually a smart strategy. There is evidence in numbers. But there can be a downside.
• There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group.
• When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
• Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige and status.

How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

• A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. Your brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or to check Instagram or to play video games. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and removal, or to achieve status.
• One person might learn to reduce stress by smoking a cigarette. Another person learn to ease their anxiety by going for a run.
• Habits are all about association.
• The specific cravings you feel and habits you perform are really an attempt to address your fundamental underlying motives.
• The money you save this month increases your purchasing power next month.
• Meditation: you can transform frustration into delight when your realise that each interruption gives you a chance to practice returning to your breath.
• The key to finding and fixing the causes of your bad habits is to reframe the associations you have about them.
• How to break a bad habit: 
• Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
• Make it Unattractive. Reframe your mind-set. Highlight the benefits of avoiding you bad habits.

The 3RD Law - Make it easy

Walk Slowly, but Never Backward.

• We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
• “The best is the enemy of the good”.
• Motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.
• Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain.
• Both common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a form of change.
• Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit.
• Habits form based on frequency, not time.
• What matters is that you take the actions you need to make to progress.
• The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.
• Focus on taking action, not being in motion.

The Law of the Least effort

• Conventional wisdom holds that motivation is the key to habit change. Maybe if you really want it, you’d actually do it. But the truth is, our real motivation  is to be lazy and to do what is convenient.
• 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 require the least amount of work.
• Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm. Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly. You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers. The greater the obstacle - that is, the more difficult the habit - the more friction there is between you and the desired state.
• One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environnement design.
• Habits are easier to build when they fit in the flow of your life.
• “Addition by subtraction”.
• The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.
• When I walk into a room everything is at the right place.
• How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?
• Human behaviour follows the Law of Least Effort.

How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-minute Rule

• I work out for two hours.
• Habits are the entry point, not the end point.
• When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.
• “If it takes less than two minutes, then do it now”. David Allen.
• Once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it.
• Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and onto paper.
• “He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle”. Greg McKeown.
• It’s’ better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
• Standardise before you optimise.
• A shutdown ritual in which he does a last email inbox check, prepares his to-do list for the next day, and says “shutdown complet” to end the work for the day.

How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

• Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.
• A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.
• Ulysse realised the benefits of locking in your future actions while your mind is in the right place rather than waiting to see where your desires take you in the moment.
• The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do.
• “Civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them” Alfred North Whitehead.
• At the slightest hint of boredom, you can get lost in the vast expanse of social media.
• We can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding work.
• Within the first week of locking myself out of social media, I realised that I didn’t need to check it nearly as often as I had been, and I certainly didn’t need each day.
• The inversion of the 3rd Law of Behaviour Change is make it difficult.

The 4th Law - Make it Satisfying

The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Range

• The problem wasn't knowledge, the problem was consistency.
• It is a lot easier for people to adopt a product that provide a strong positive sensory signal, for example the mint taste of toothpaste, than it is to adopt a habit that does not provide pleasurable sensory feedback, like flossing one's teeth.
• The final law of Behavior Change: make it satisfying.
• 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.
• But there is a trick. We are not looking for just any type of satisfaction. We are looking for immediate satisfaction.
• Animals: You live in what scientists call an immediate-return environment because your actions instantly deliver clear and immediate outcomes.
• Humans: You live in what scientists call a delayed-return environment because you can work for years before your actions deliver the intended payoff.
• You are walking around with the same hardware as your Paleolithic ancestors.
• Time inconsistency: the way your brain evaluates rewards is inconsistent across time. You value the present more than the future.
• Time inconsistency is also referred to as hyperbolic discounting.
• 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...Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits". Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
• What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
• As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.
• Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.

How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

• The best way to measure your progress is with a habit tracker.
• "Don't break the chain" is a powerful mantra.
• Most of us have a distorted view of our own behavior. We think we act better than we do. Measurements offers one way to overcome our blindness to our own behavior and notice what's really going on each day.
• When you're feeling down, it's easy to forget about all the progress you have already made.
• After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT]
• Never miss twice.
• If I miss one day, I try to get back into it as quickly as possible.
• Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
• "The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily."
• It's easy to train when you feel good, but it's crucial to show up when you don't feel like it - even if you do less than you hope.
• We focus on working long hours instead of getting meaningful work done.
• Charles Goodhardt: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
• Each measurement provides a little bit of evidence that you're moving in the right direction and a brief moment of immediate pleasure for a job well done.
• One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress.

How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

• Make it immediately unsatisfying.
• Pain is an effective teacher. If a failure is painful, it get fixed.
• Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced.
• You can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable.
• To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them painful in the moment. Creating a habit contract is a straightforward way to do exactly that.
• We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.

Advanced Tactics - How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great

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.
• You want to play a game where the odds are in your favor.
• Competence is highly dependent on context.
• In short: genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
• The key is to direct your effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills, to align your ambition with your ability.
• How do I figure out where the odds are in my favor? How do I identify the opportunities and habits that are right for me?
• Personality traits is known as the "Big Five":
• Openness to experience: from curious and inventive on one end to cautious and consistent on the other.
• Conscientiousness: organized and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous.
• Extroversion: outgoing and energetic to solitary and reserved (you likely know them as extroverts vs. introverts)
• Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached.
• Neuroticism: anxious and sensitive to confident, calm, and stable.
• Read whatever fascinates you.
• You don't have to build the habits everyone tells you to build.
• Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is the most popular.
• Learning to play a game where the odds are in your favor is critical for maintaining motivation and feeling successful.
• 3rd Law: make it easy.
• Explore/exploit trade-off.
• After this initial period of exploration, shift your focus to the best solution you've found - but keep it experimenting occasionally. The proper balance depends on whether you're winning or losing. 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?
• What makes me lose track of time? Flow is the mental state you enter when you are so focused on the task at hand that the rest of the world fades away. This blend of happiness and peak performance is what athletes and performers experience when they are "in the zone".
• Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
• What comes naturally to me? Look inside yourself and ask, "What feels natural to me? When have I felt alive? When have I felt like the real me?
• Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction.
• 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.
• The more you master a specific skill, the harder it becomes for others to compete with you.
• If you can find a more favorable environment, you can transform the situation from one where the odds are against you to one where they are in your favor.
• Work hard on the things that come easy.

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.
• Your focus narrows, distractions fade away, and you find yourself fully invested in the task at hand.
• The Goldilocks Rule states that human 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.
• Yerkes-Dodson law describes the optimal level of arousal (excitation) as the midpoint between boredom and anxiety.
• A flow state is the experience of being "in the zone" and fully immersed in an activity.
• Goldilocks Rule remains: working on challenges of just manageable difficulty - something on the perimeter of your ability - seems crucial for maintaining motivation.
• At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.
• The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
• Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.
• As Machiavelli noted "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".
• In psychology, this is known as a variable reward. Slot machines are the most common real-world example. A gambler hits the jackpot every now and then but not at a predictable interval. The pace of rewards varies. This variance leads to the greatest spike of dopamine, enhances memory recall, and accelerates habit formation. 
• Professionals take action even when the mood isn't right.
• The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.

The Downside of Creating Good Habits

• Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
• Although habits are powerful, what you need is a way to remain conscious of your performance over time.
• You must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency.
• Career Best Effort (CBE).
• Sought peak performance by getting slightly better each day.
• Best effort spiritually and mentally and physically.
• 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 to do the same way every time.
• Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge is one of the greatest marathoners of all time and Olympic gold medalist. He still takes notes after every practice in which he reviews his training for the day and searches for areas that can be improved. Similarly, gold medal swimmer Katie Ledecky records her wellness on a scale of 1 to 10 and includes notes on her nutrition and how well she slept.
• You don't want to keep practicing a habit if it becomes ineffective.
• Annual review:
• What went well this year?
• What didn't go so well this year?
• What did I learn?
• I conduct an Integrity Report. Like everyone, I make a lot of mistakes.
• Reflection and review offers an ideal time to revisit one of the most important aspects of behavior change: identity.
• Integrity Report:
• What are the core values that drive my life and work?
• How am I living and working with integrity right now?
• How can I set a higher standard in the future?
• Reflection and review offers an ideal time to revisit one of the most important aspects of behavior change: identity.
• The more sacred an idea is to us - that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity - the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.
• Paul Graham: "Keep your identity small".
• When you spend your whole life defining yourself in one way and that disappears, who are you now?
• The key to mitigating these losses of identity is to redefine yourself such that you get to keep important aspects of your identity even if your particular role changes.
• Everything is impermanent.
• A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
• The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.

Little Lessons from the Four Laws

• A craving can only occur after you have notice the opportunity.
• Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire.
• Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
• Caed Budris: " Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming"
• With a big enough why you can overcome any how.
• Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how"
• If your motivation and desire are great enough (that is, why are you acting), you'll take action even when it is quite difficult.
• Being curious is better than being smart.
• Emotions drive behavior.
• We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional.
• Emotions can be a threat to wise decision making.
• If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don't really want it. It's time to have an honest conversation with yourself.
• The reward only comes after the energy is spent.
• Self-control requires you to release a desire rather than satisfy it.
• "Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more" Seneque.
• Before acting, there is a feeling that motivates you to act - the craving. After acting, there is a feeling that teaches you to repeat the action in the future.
• Desire initiates. Pleasure sustains. Pleasure and satisfaction are what sustain a behavior.
• Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance.
• We continually grasp for the latest get-rich-quick or weight-loss scheme.
• New strategies seem more appealing than old ones because they can have unbounded hope. As Aristotle noted "Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope".
• In the beginning, hope is all you have.
• "If you wish to persuade, appeal to interest, rather than reason" Benjamin Franklin.
• The feeling comes first (System 1). Daniel Kahneman.
• "Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself" Viktor E. Frankl.