Atomic Habits by James Clear

Chapter 1

• Too often we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action
• ⭐ Habits are the compound interest of self improvement
• ⭐ Not only are habits hard to form, they also easy to lose. The pace of transformation is slow. That means single decisions are easy to dismiss like working late and neglecting your family - they will probably forgive you that time but after you do it a few times…
• 1% improvement for a year means being 37x better by the end of the year - the same thing applies to over the course of a lifetime
• Pay more attention to your trajectory than to your current state
  • ⭐ Flying from LA, if you adjust the plane by 3.5 degrees, you’ll end up in Washington DC instead of New York
• ⭐ Outcomes are lagging indicators of habits - weight is a lagging indicator of eating habits, wealth is a lagging indicator of financial habits, relationships are a lagging indicator of social habits
  • ⭐ You get what you repeat
• Good habits make time your ally, bad habits make time your enemy
  • Stress compounds into health problems
  • Consistently looking at people as rude, angry, or selfish means that will be all you will see
  • Relationships compound
• Ice cube analogy for success - all the work you’ve done is not for nothing, it’s just stored potential
• ⭐ Prevailing wisdom is that the best way to achieve what we want in life is to set specific, actionable goals
• Goals are about the outcome you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those outcomes
• Goals are good for setting a direction, systems are good for making progress
• Problems with only setting goals
  • ⭐ Winners & losers have the same goals
  • Achieving a goal only means momentary change → then a new goal is necessary + motivation → too much thinking and often leads to losing the habits you started with
  • ⭐ Specific goals restrict your happiness
    • Setting a goal often means that you are only able to be happy achieving the goal that you set out for - it’s very unlikely that life works out exactly like you planned
    • Instead fall in love with the process

⭐⭐⭐ You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. ⭐⭐⭐

Chapter 2

• There are three layers of behavior change - 1. outcome change 2. process change 3. identity change
  • ⭐ People often start with the outcome they want and that leads to outcome based habits, identity-based habits are often far more powerful
• Use your identity as leverage - “no thanks, I’m not a smoker” vs. “I’m trying to quit”
• Behavior that does not fit with the self does not last
  • If your identity is someone who consumes vs. someone who creates, you will probably not be able to make money
• Taking pride in some aspect of yourself is a great lever to start building habits - you’ll defend that pride no matter what
• Behaviors directly lead from who you think you are, either consciously or subconsciously
• ⭐ Don’t get too attached to any part of your identity. Progress requires constant editing, updating, and expanding of your identity
  • Leadership, communication, thinking
  • ⭐ Not only can habits induce results, but habits are a way to change your beliefs about yourself
• Each experience in life modifies your self image, but because habits are so frequent, they are the most important votes to who you want to be
• ⭐ You are what you repeat

Chapter 3

• 4 steps to habit formation & 4 strategies to achieve a better habit
  • cue → make it obvious
  • craving → make it attractive
  • response → make it easy
  • reward → make it satisfying
• The inverse applies to when you’re trying to break a habit

Make it obvious

Chapter 4

• If you’re having trouble identifying whether a certain habit is good or bad - ask yourself, “is this a vote towards the type of person that I’d like to become?”
• Becoming aware of your habits is essential before you change them
• Verbalizing what you’re about to do out loud, “Point & Call” style, is a great way to feel the consequences more handily

Chapter 5

• Make the behavior obvious
• ⭐ The most obvious cues (step 1) are location and time
• ⭐ Use intention implementation to appeal to them → At 8am on every MWF, I will workout for at least an hour
• Use habit stacking as another approach → After I wake up, shower and go for a walk outside, every T-TH-S-SU, I will read for an hour and a half or everyday when I drink a cup of coffee I will write a plan for the day

Chapter 6

• Stop thinking about the objects in your spaces, think about the relationships with the things in those spaces
• ⭐ Behavior is a function of a person in their environment: $B = f(P, E)$
• The human body has 11 million sensory receptors, about 10 million are dedicated to vision
• “One space, one use” → in smaller spaces, a desk can be used for writing, a chair for reading, etc.
• Redesign your environment so that it makes the habits that you want to form easier
• Putting yourself in a new environment makes breaking old habits much easier

Chapter 7

• ~20 percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were addicted to heroin, only 1/10 of them remained addicted when they came back to the US
• Disciplined people often have disciplined environments, where they aren’t exposed to temptations all the time → that means that they only have to use willpower occasionally
• Bad habits tend to be self-reinforcing → you feel bad because you ate poorly, so you eat more

Make it attractive

Chapter 8

• Dopamine is released in anticipation of reward
  • After you learn a habit, you don’t receive dopamine as a reward
  • If you perform the behavior and don’t achieve the reward, your dopamine levels tank
  • ⭐ If the reward comes later than you expect, dopamine levels tank, but then shoot up (as if the brain is saying “I told you, you just had to wait, do this again next time”)
• ⭐ Your brain has way more neural areas dedicated to wanting than liking
  • Nucleus accumbens, brain stem, ventral tegmental area, dorstal striatum, amygdala and parts of the prefrontal cortex
  • “Hedonic hot spots” are located throughout the brain but in much smaller quantity
• Temptation bundling means stacking something that you need to do together with something that you want to do
  • ex. after I exercise, I will eat chocolate
  • ⭐ Premack’s Principle - “more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors”
• Stacking temptation bundling and habit stacking together can be useful

Chapter 9

• ⭐ The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us
• There are three groups that we tend to imitate
  • The close (friends, family, etc.)
  • The many (the tribe)
    • Peer pressure of group surrounding you is only bad if they are bad influences
    • Solomon Asch line experiment is great example
    • ⭐ Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the group than right by ourselves
    • When changing our habits means challenging the tribe, it seems unattractive, when changing our habits means approval, respect, or praise, it is attractive (find the right groups to join!)
  • The powerful
    • We all want to gain status and prestige, we imitate people that we envy
• ⭐ To create a habit, join a culture where 1) the behavior is normal, 2) you already have things in common with people (ex. Nerd Fitness where you have interests outside of fitness that bring you together)

Chapter 10

• Every behavior has a surface level craving and an underlying motivation
• Some of our underlying motivations
  • Conserve energy
  • Obtain food and water
  • Find love and reproduce
  • Connect and bond with others
  • Win social acceptance and approval
  • Reduce uncertainty
  • Achieve status and prestige
  • More here (atomichabits.com/business)
• ⭐ Our habits are just modern-day solutions to ancient desires
• “You think smoking is something you need to do to be social, but it’s not. You can be social without smoking at all”
• We perceive life as reactive, but it is also predictive
  • Cue → prediction of how acting will help/solve a problem → feeling that we want to do something
• Whenever a habit satisfies an underlying motive, we develop a craving to do it again
• To make hard things attractive → reframe them
  • ⭐ Change “have to” to “get to”
  • Finance → “living below my means right now will increase my future means”
  • Meditation → distractions are an opportunity to improve
  • Pregame jitters → “I’m nervous” → “I’m excited and the adrenaline is going to help me focus”

Make it easy

Chapter 11

• Being in motion is different than taking action
  • Being in motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without exposing ourselves to the possibility of public failure
  • ⭐ When preparation becomes a form of procrastinastion, it’s time to change something
• Practice is the best way to learn something

Chapter 12

• Guns, Germs & Steel mentioned the north-south orientation and east-west orientation being a game-changer when it came to the ability for agriculture to spread, that compounded into bigger populations for Europe & Asia, and ultimately much more powerful societies
• The Law of Least Effort - people will naturally gravitate towards the action that is easier
  • Principle of Least Action - Any two particles will follow the path that requires the least amount of effort
• Addition by subtraction - remove something and make the whole better
• Make habits easy - if you want to be better at sending thank you cards, keep a bunch at home in easy to reach places

Chapter 13 - Two Minute Rule

• There are decisive moments during the day that determine how the rest of your day will turn out → master easy habits that take advantage of those moments to give you better opportunities for the rest of the day
• ⭐ When you start a new habit, it should take less than 2 minutes to do
• To build a habit, it’s often optimal to do less than you feel like doing
  • “Stay below the point where it feels like work”
• Standardize before you optimize
  • Just start doing something and then make it what you want

Chapter 14

• Using a commitment device can be useful
  • Something that you do in the present (while in a good mental space, that determines your actions in the future)
  • Nir Eyal uses an outlet timer that cuts off power to his router at 10pm each night
• The key is to make the task require more energy to get out of it than to stay with it
• Automating things is huge for maintaining habits
  • Automatic investments, automatic portfolio rebalancing, etc.
  • ⭐ This is especially true for things that are not done often enough to turn into a habit (like things that happen once a month or things that happen once a year)
• When there is no effort required to act on your desires, you can find yourself acting on them much more quickly than you think

Make it satisfying

Chapter 15

• The first 3 laws of behavior change — make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy — all have to do with doing it this time. Make it satisfying has to do with making it more likely to do it next time.
• ⭐ The neocortex (the part of the brain responsible for higher order functions) is the same size now as it was 200,000 years ago
• The costs of a good habit are felt right now, the costs of a bad habit are felt in the future. Because of our time inconsistency, this makes making the right decision hard
• ⭐ The more immediate of a reward you receive, the more you should question whether it aligns with your longterm goals
• What is immediately rewarded is repeated, what is immediately punished is not
• The best approach is reinforcement, which ties your habit to an immediate reward
  • ⭐ Immediate rewards keep you excited about doing things while the longterm benefits of what you are doing are still coming → those longterm benefits can then become self-feeding
  • Some of the hardest habits to build are habits of avoidance. These are successfully avoiding doing something
    • like shopping, or buying coffee, etc.
    • When you avoid something, do something satisfying, like putting money into an account or something else

Chapter 16

• Habit trackers are really useful - check off the habit each time you do it - another way to remember this is thinking about the ‘paper clip strategy’
  • This reinforces 1. make it obvious, 3. make it attractive, and 4. make it satisfying
  • It also keeps your eye on the process, not the reward
• Manually tracking things should be kept for your most important habits
• ⭐ If you miss a day, never miss twice
  • We often fall into an all or nothing spiral with habits
  • Sluggish days and bad workouts are often the most important ones to show up for → they maintain the work from previous days
• ⭐ The human mind wants to win whatever game is being played, make sure you’re choosing the right numbers or things to track
• ⭐ Charles Goodhart - “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
  • Each number is one piece of feedback in the whole system

Chapter 17

• Punishments can be successful → only 14% of people in the US regularly wore a seatbelt in 1984 - now it’s around 88%
• A habit contract can be used to add social cost to any misperformed behavior - where others are notified of your behavior if you don’t follow through

Chapter 18

• People who are more competent in a given area are praised for doing a good job. They often continue to be motivated because they are able to do what other people fail at
• Explore / Exploit → Google gives 80% of time to work on work and 20% of time to focus on side projects
• ⭐ Questions to ask yourself
  • What hurts me less than it hurts others? What feels like fun to me but work to others?
  • What puts me in a flow state?
  • Where can I compare myself favorably to others? (let it work for you)
  • What feels natural to me? When have I felt alive? When I felt like the real me?
• ⭐ People get so caught up that they have limits, that they never put in the effort to get close to them

Chapter 19

• The human brain loves a challenge if it’s in the right realm of challenging
  • Scientists have tried to quantify this and have arrived at things that are ~4% more difficult than your current skillset
  • Flow can be seen as a balanced position between System 1 thinking and System 2 thinking
• “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”
• Machiavelli - “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”
• ⭐ Variable rewards are more satisfying, but you wouldn’t want variable rewards for everything - like Google, Uber, flossing
• You have to fall in love with boredom
• ⭐ ”Stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur”

Chapter 20

• Mastery = habits + deliberate practice
  • Mastery is the process of choosing one step in the process and focusing on it until it is perfect and habitual, then moving on to the next thing
• ⭐ Habits can also lead you to pay less attention to little mistakes you are making
• ⭐ Reflect & review
  • Yearly reflection (each December)
    • What went well this year?
    • What didn’t go so well this year?
    • What did I learn?
  • Yearly integrity report (each June)
    • 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?
• ⭐ “Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life” - Lao Tzu
• Just don’t stop!

Little Lessons From the Four Laws

• ⭐ Happiness is the absence of desire. When you don’t want to change your current state. That makes it fleeting. Suffering is the opposite (time between when you crave a change in state and when you get it)
• We seek the image of pleasure that we conjure in our mind. We’re not sure what it will actually feel like
• ⭐ Peace happens when you make an observation and don’t feel the need to change anything (feel a craving)
• ⭐ Being motivated and curious is better than being smart. The first leads to motivation, the latter does not (Naval → “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire to do it”)
• Having an emotion/craving drives behavior
• ⭐ Actions reveal how badly you want something
• ⭐ Self-control is difficult because it isn’t rewarding. It’s just waiting for a desire to pass
• The gap between our cravings and the reward determines how satisfied we are with the reward
  • Seneca “Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more”