Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

by James Clear

A habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly—and, in many cases, automatically.

changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.

“the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do.

improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

Change can take years—before it happens all at once.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.

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 setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

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

Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.

Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.

It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.

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.

The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior. In fact, the word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.

Your habits are just a series of automatic solutions that solve the problems and stresses you face regularly.

The primary reason the brain remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future.

The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.

Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state.

The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.

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. You can notice an opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it. This is what makes habits useful.

The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.

The human body has about eleven million sensory receptors. Approximately ten million of those are dedicated to sight. Some experts estimate that half of the brain’s resources are used on vision. Given that we are more dependent on vision than on any other sense, it should come as no surprise that visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior. For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do.

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.

When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control.

In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist 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. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.

Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival.

“The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”

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.

The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual.

A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive.

Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.

The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity. Neuroscientists call this long-term potentiation, which refers to the strengthening of connections between neurons in the brain based on recent patterns of activity.

It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.

Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy.

We are limited by where our habits lead us. This is why mastering the decisive moments throughout your day is so important.

Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.

A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future. It is a way to lock in future behavior, bind you to good habits, and restrict you from bad ones.

the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.

Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behavior and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity.