Atomic Habits
By James Clear
Overview: Compounded over time, small habits can make a difference in your life. Understanding the four-step model of habits—cue, craving, response, and reward—allows you to develop an actionable plan to build good habits and/or break bad ones.
“The quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.”
Chapter 1:
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The effects of good habits multiply as you repeat them.
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.
Forget about goals, focus on systems. Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. Don’t focus on changing results, change the systems that cause those results. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Chapter 2:
Behavior shapes your identity, and behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.
With identity-based habits, the focus in on who you wish to become, not what you wish to achieve.
True behavior 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. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
The biggest barrier to positive change at any level is identity conflict. Good habits can make sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.
Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
To develop a new identity: 1) decide the type of person you want to be; and 2) prove it with small wins.
Chapter 3:
Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it.
Four-step habit “feedback loop”: Cue, craving, response, reward.
What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state that it delivers.
Four Laws of Behavior Change:
Make it obvious;
Make it attractive;
Make it easy; and
Make it satisfying. (Invert to break a bad habit.)
Chapter 5:
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.
Habit stacking: Identify a current habit and stack your new behavior on top.
Chapter 6:
Environment shapes human behavior.
If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable. A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form.
Chapter 7:
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.
One of the most practical way to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
Chapter 8:
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop.
Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it. When dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.
Temptation bundling: Pair an action you want to do with action that you need to do.
Chapter 10:
Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires.
Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you faced they are just the methods that you learned to use.
There are many ways to address the same underlying motive, but once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.
Our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
Chapter 11:
Focus on action, not being in motion.
Habits form based on frequency, not time. The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.
Habit formation is the process by which a behavior become progressively more automatic through repetition.
Chapter 12:
In a sense, every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want. (Examples: Exercising regularly is an obstacle to getting fit. Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm.)
Much of the battle of building better habits is to find ways to reduce friction associated with good habits and to find ways to increase friction associated with our bad ones.
Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.
Chapter 13:
Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. These decisive moments set the options available to your future self.
We are limited by where our habits lead us. That is why mastering the decisive moments throughout your day are so important.
The Two-Minute Rule: “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”
Ritualize the beginning of the processes you want to achieve.
Chapter 14:
Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.
Chapter 15:
Every habit produces multiple outcomes over time. 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.
The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. “The last mile is always the least crowded.”
Chapter 16:
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 the start of a new habit.
Chapter 19:
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.
Chapter 20:
Habits + deliberate practice = mastery
Review and reflect…
Yearly:
1. What went well this year?
2. What didn’t go so well this year?
3. What did I learn?
Six months later (Integrity report):
1. What are the core values that drive my life and work?
2. How am I living and working with that integrity right now?
3. How can I set a higher standard in the future?
__________
Success is not a goal to achieve 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.
Happiness is simply the absence of desire. It’s the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems.
Our expectations determine our satisfaction. Happiness is relative.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how?” —Nietzsche
“Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.” —Seneca
What I got out of it:
An incredibly insightful book with useful information on how to make the necessary changes to help improve your life and well-being.