Atomic Habits An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones
James Clear
Highlights
[W]hen we repeat 1 percent errors, day after day, by replicating poor decisions, duplicating tiny mistakes, and rationalizing little excuses, our small choices compound into toxic results. It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.
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Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
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You get what you repeat.
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When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it’s the work you did long ago—when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress—that makes the jump today possible.
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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.
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[G]oals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness. This is misguided. It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success.
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They set goals and determine the actions they should take to achieve those goals without considering the beliefs that drive their actions. They never shift the way they look at themselves, and they don’t realize that their old identity can sabotage their new plans for change.
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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.
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Once you have adopted an identity, it can be easy to let your allegiance to it impact your ability to change.
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[T]he real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way. This is why 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.
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Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it.
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[W]e must begin the process of behavior change with awareness.
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Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.
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You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing.
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Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. Despite our unique personalities, certain behaviors tend to arise again and again under certain environmental conditions.
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The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often.
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It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.
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Behaviors are attractive when they help us fit in.
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Our friends and family provide a sort of invisible peer pressure that pulls us in their direction.
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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. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day.
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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.
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Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.
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It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”
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[T]he biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
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Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.
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Habits are the entry point, not the end point.
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What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path.
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Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.
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The problem wasn’t knowledge. The problem was consistency.
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[T]he costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
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The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
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[W]e optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.
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[G]enes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
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The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.
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[I]t’s more productive to focus on whether you are fulfilling your own potential than comparing yourself to someone else.
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[M]any of us get depressed when we lose focus or motivation because we think that successful people have some bottomless reserve of passion.
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[E]veryone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
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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.
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When chosen effectively, an identity can be flexible rather than brittle. Like water flowing around an obstacle, your identity works with the changing circumstances rather than against them.
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New strategies seem more appealing than old ones because they can have unbounded hope.