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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
February 9 - March 3, 2022
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
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.
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.
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 goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
As behavioral scientist Jason Hreha writes, “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work.
The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
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.
Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
As Charlie Munger says, “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.”
You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.
There is a version of every habit that can bring you joy and satisfaction. Find it. Habits need to be enjoyable if they are going to stick. This is the core idea behind the 4th Law.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
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.
Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.
The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges 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.
