Below is my summary of the book ‘Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones’ by James Clear.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.
Good habits make time your ally.
Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.
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.
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.
It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.
What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results.
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.
The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game.
The problem is your system.
You fall to the level of your systems.
Habits are like the atoms of our lives.
This is the meaning of the phrase atomic habits — a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.
The first layer is changing your outcomes.
The second layer is changing your process.
The third and deepest layer is changing your identity.
Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.
Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.
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.
True behavior change is identity change.
Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity.
The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult it is to change it.
You can’t get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
Your identity emerges out of your habits.
Your habits are how you embody your identity.
The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior.
Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness”.
The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.
We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.
Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity.
The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.
New identities require new evidence.
It is a simple two-step process:
Work backward from the results you want to the type of person who could get those results.
Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits.
Identity change is the North Star of habit change.
You need to know who you want to be.
You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself.
Habits are about becoming someone.
Your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be.
A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.
This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try differently.
Your 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 are mental shortcuts learned from experience.
Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain.
Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it.
It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.
Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future.
The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.
First, there is the cue. The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior.
Cravings are the second step, and they are the motivational force behind every habit. Without some level of motivation or desire — without craving a change — we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.
The thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the observer are what transform a cue into a craving.
The third step is the response. The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action.
Finally, the response delivers a reward. Rewards are the end goal of every habit.
The first purpose of rewards is to satisfy your craving.
Second, rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future.
Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle.
The cue triggers a craving, which motivates a response, which provides a reward, which satisfies the craving and, ultimately, becomes associated with the cue.
The problem phase includes the cue and the craving, and it is when you realize that something needs to change.
The solution phase includes the response and the reward, and it is when you take action and achieve the change you desire.
How to Create a Good Habit:
How to Break a Bad Habit:
This is one of the most surprising insights about our habits: you don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin.
It’s also what makes them dangerous. As habits form, your actions come under the direction of your automatic and nonconscious mind.
Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones.
A simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior.
To create your own, make a list of your daily habits.
Once you have a full list, look at each behavior, and ask yourself, “Is this a good habit, a bad habit, or a neutral habit?” If it is a good habit, write “+” next to it. If it is a bad habit, write “–”. If it is a neutral habit, write “=”.
For this exercise, categorize your habits by how they will benefit you in the long run.
Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good.
The goal is to simply notice what is actually going on.
The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for them.
The process of behavior change always starts with awareness.
Implementation intention, which is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a particular habit.
The two most common cues are time and location.
“When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
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 when what they really lack is clarity.
“I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”
Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world.
You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing.
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 [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day.
If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.
You can train yourself to link a particular habit with a particular context.
A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form.
The “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control.
The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least.
You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.
The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to become habit-forming.
The ability to experience pleasure remained, but without dopamine, desire died. And without desire, action stopped.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop.
Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.
It is the anticipation of a reward — not the fulfillment of it — that gets us to take action.
Desire is the engine that drives behavior.
Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED].
After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].
We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.
We pick up habits from the people around us.
Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior and you already have something in common with the group.
Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.
A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive.
Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires.
There are many different ways to address the same underlying motive.
Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive.
Our behavior is heavily dependent on these predictions.
These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving — a feeling, a desire, an urge.
A craving is the sense that something is missing.
Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.
Our feelings and emotions tell us whether to hold steady in our current state or to make a change.
You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience.
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.
You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.
Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition.
Repeating a habit leads to clear physical changes in the brain.
All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice to automatic behavior, a process known as automaticity.
What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior.
What matters is that you take the actions you need to take to make progress.
Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible.
Every action requires a certain amount of energy.
Every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want.
What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers.
Make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.
One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design.
The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.
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.
Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.
Habits are automatic choices that influence the conscious decisions that follow.
Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments.
The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments.
When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.
What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path.
A habit must be established before it can be improved.
You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.
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.
The key is to change the task such that it requires more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it.
The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do.
When working in your favor, automation can make your good habits inevitable and your bad habits impossible.
We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying.
Conversely, if an experience is not satisfying, we have little reason to repeat it.
The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
With our bad habits, the immediate outcome usually feels good, but the ultimate outcome feels bad.
With good habits, it is the reverse: the immediate outcome is unenjoyable, but the ultimate outcome feels good.
The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
The vital thing in getting a habit to stick is to feel successful.
You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying.
Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
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.
Habit tracking creates a visual cue that can remind you to act, is inherently motivating because you see the progress you are making and don’t want to lose it, and feels satisfying whenever you record another successful instance of your habit.
The habit stacking + habit tracking formula is:
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT].
I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.
Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
We optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.
Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
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.
The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behavior.
Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced.
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.
To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them painful in the moment.
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.
The areas where you are genetically predisposed to success are the areas where habits are more likely to be satisfying.
Your personality is the set of characteristics that is consistent from situation to situation. The most proven scientific analysis of personality traits is known as the “Big Five,” which breaks them down into five spectrums of behavior.
Your personality is the set of characteristics that is consistent from situation to situation.
The “Big Five” breaks personality traits down into five spectrums of behavior:
Our deeply rooted preferences make certain behaviors easier for some people than for others.
Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.
The explore/exploit trade-off.
In the beginning of a new activity, there should be a period of exploration.
After this initial period of exploration, shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found — but keep experimenting occasionally.
Questions you can ask yourself:
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.
Once we realize our strengths, we know where to spend our time and energy.
Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.
Work hard on the things that come easy.
The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.
Maximum motivation occurs when facing a challenge of just manageable difficulty.
When you’re starting a new habit, it’s important to keep the behavior as easy as possible so you can stick with it even when conditions aren’t perfect.
Once a habit has been established, however, it’s important to continue to advance in small ways.
You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated.
Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and failure.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood.
The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors.
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
After one habit has been mastered, you have to return to the effortful part of the work and begin building the next habit.
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.
Improvement is not just about learning habits, it’s also about fine-tuning them.
One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are.
Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.
Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.
Whenever you’re looking to improve, you can rotate through the Four Laws of Behavior Change until you find the next bottleneck. Make it obvious. Make it attractive. Make it easy. Make it satisfying.
The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.
Awareness comes before desire.
Happiness is simply the absence of desire. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
It is the idea of pleasure that we chase.
Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems. If you do not desire to act on what you observe, then you are at peace.
With a big enough ‘why’ you can overcome any ‘how’.
Being curious is better than being smart.
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.
Reward is on the other side of sacrifice.
Self-control is difficult because it is not satisfying.
Our expectations determine our satisfaction. Satisfaction = Liking – Wanting
The pain of failure correlates to the height of expectation.
Feelings come both before and after the behavior. Cue > Craving (Feeling) > Response > Reward (Feeling)
Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance.
Desire initiates. Pleasure sustains.