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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
August 31 - October 3, 2024
Benefit #1: Habit tracking is obvious.
Benefit #2: Habit tracking is attractive.
This can be particularly powerful on a bad day. When you’re feeling down, it’s easy to forget about all the progress you have already made. Habit tracking provides visual proof of your hard work—a subtle reminder of how far you’ve come.
Benefit #3: Habit tracking is satisfying.
In summary, habit tracking (1) creates a visual cue that can remind you to act, (2) is inherently motivating because you see the progress you are making and don’t want to lose it, and (3) feels satisfying whenever you record another successful instance of your habit. Furthermore, habit tracking provides visual proof that you are casting votes for the type of person you wish to become, which is a delightful form of immediate and intrinsic gratification.*
First, whenever possible, measurement should be automated.
Once you know where to get the data, add a note to your calendar to review it each week or each month, which is more practical than tracking it every day.
Second, manual tracking should be limited to your most important habits.
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
This is why the “bad” workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. Simply doing something—ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything really—is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding.
it’s not always about what happens during the workout. It’s about being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity.
Profound
The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.
The human mind wants to “win” whatever game is being played.
In short, we optimize for what we measure.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
perhaps it’s time to focus on a different measurement—one
If you want to prevent bad habits and eliminate unhealthy behaviors, then adding an instant cost to the action is a great way to reduce their odds.
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.
What feels like fun to me, but work to others? The mark of whether you are made for a task is not whether you love it but whether you can handle the pain of the task easier than most people. When are you enjoying yourself while other people are complaining? The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.
Specialization is a powerful way to overcome the “accident” of bad genetics. The more you master a specific skill, the harder it becomes for others to compete with you.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
novelty.
Junk foods provide culinary novelty.
At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
Improvement is not just about learning habits, it’s also about fine-tuning them. Reflection and review ensures that you spend your time on the right things and make
A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.
“If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.”
This is a continuous process. There is no finish line. There is no permanent solution. Whenever you’re looking to improve, you can rotate through the Four Laws of Behavior Change until you find the next bottleneck. Make it obvious. Make it attractive. Make it easy. Make it satisfying. Round and round. Always looking for the next way to get 1 percent better.
Small habits don’t add up. They compound.
Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire.
Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
The primary mode of the brain is to feel; the secondary mode is to think.
The source of all suffering is the desire for a change in state.
Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.
