Atomic Habits
By James ClearThe Fundamentals
Goals Restrict Your Happiness
The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.
A goal is a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you desire.
How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
Many people walk through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity:
- “I’m terrible with directions.”
- “I’m not a morning person.”
- “I’m bad at remembering people’s names.”
- “I’m always late.”
- “I’m not good with technology.”
- “I’m horrible at math.” When you repeat these stories to yourself for years, it is easy to slide into these mental grooves and accept them as fact.
You can break these negative assumptions about yourself through habits. For example: if you think you are not a writer, but would like to be, make a habit of writing every day.
Changing your identity is a two step process:
- Decide the type of person you want to be.
- Prove it to yourself with small wins.
Ask yourself, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?” “Who is the type of person that could run a successful start-up?”
How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps
Making habits:
- Make it obvious.
- Make it attractive.
- Make it easy.
- Make it satisfying.
Breaking habits:
- Make it invisible.
- Make it unattractive.
- Make it difficult.
- Make it unsatisfying.
The 1st Law: Make It Obvious
The Diderot Effect
Obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
Habit Stacking
One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top of it.
“After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More
If possible, have a single room or environment for each important use in you life like sleep, work and relaxation.
If you can’t get and entirely new environment, create a space for work, study, excercise, entertainment, and cooking.
“One space, one use.”
I can be difficult to go to bed early if you watch TV in you bedroom each night an it can be hard to study in the living room if thats where you always play video games.
The Secret To Self-Control
Make the cue of your good habits obvious and the cues of you bad habits invisible.
The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive
Temptation Bundling
Bundle the habits you want to create with things you already enjoy doing.
- Only watch you favorite show on the treadmill.
Habit Stacking + Temptation Bundling
- After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED].
- After I [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].
Example:
- After I brush my teeth, I will stretch for 5 minutes.
- After I stretch for 5 minutes, I will check instagram.
Reprogramming
Change your internal dialogue. You don’t “have to” you “get to.”
You get to wake up early for work, you get to make another sales call for your business, you get to cook dinner for you family.
Be empowered by your good choices
Rituals
Associate rituals with our habits to make getting into the correct state of mind easier. For example, putting you headphones on anytime you are working. After a while, you will feel focused just from putting on your headphones.
The 3rd Law: Make It Easy
Progress
Don’t worry about optimization at the start, just do the thing you need to do.
How Long Does It Take to Build a New Habit?
A better question is how many? Time does not matter, repetitions do.
The Two-Minute Rule
When you start a new habit it should take less than two minutes to execute.
- Read before bed -> Read one page.
- Do thirty minutes of yoga -> Take out my yoga mat.
- Study for class -> Open my notes.
- Run three miles -> Tie my running shoes. You’ll often find that just completing this scaled down version make the full behavior much easier. You can also do this as the whole habit at the start.
Writing
In a writing or journalling practice, it is often best to stop when you feel like you have more to write.
Automate Your Habits
Example: plug your wifi router into an outlet time that turns off an hour before bed.
One-Time Actions That Lock In Good Habits
- Buy a good mattress.
- Buy good shoes to avoid back pain.
- Unsubscribe from emails.
- Turn of notifications and mute chats.
- Set your phone to silent.
- Use filters to clean you email.
- Ask service providers for a lower bill.
- Set up automatic bill pay.
- Cut cable service.
- Change the password to your social media accounts and give it to someone until the weekend.
The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying
Finance
Open a savings account for something you want to save up for, and every time you decide not to order uber eats or spend money on a video game, move that amount into the savings account.
Tacking
Using physical objects to track your progress can be very satisfying. For example, you have a paper clip in a bowl for every hour of a course you want to complete. Every time you complete an hour you move a paperclip into another bowl. Can also do this with coins and allow yourself to spend the money on something indulgent once you reach your goal.
People who track their habits are more likely to keep them. A study found that people who kept a food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not.
Failure
A primary difference between winners and losers is that when winners fail or have a setback, they rebound quickly.
Accountability
Creating a contract for a habit you want to stick to and having important people in your life sign is as well as yourself can be a power habit adhesive.
Advanced Tactics: Go From Good to Great
Stacking The Odds
Ask yourself:
- What feels like fun to me, but work for others?
- What makes me loose track of time?
- Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
Everyone one has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. It’s the combination of multiple of these areas that can make your output rare and valuable.
For Scott Adams, he was a decent cartoonist, reasonably funny, and had experience working in a corporate setting. Any of these attributes alone have little value, but combined, they allowed Scott Adams to create the wildly successful comic Dilbert.
Motivations
Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still finds a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
Review
At the end of the year, consider counting up how many times you executed on the habits you wanted to build. Figure out:
- What went well this year?
- What didn’t go so well this year?
- What did I learn?