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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
April 19 - July 11, 2019
French philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote, “The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.”
If you work in a job where everyone wears expensive suits, then you’ll be inclined to splurge on one as well. If all of your friends are sharing an inside joke or using a new phrase, you’ll want to do it, too, so they know that you “get it.” Behaviors are attractive when they help us fit in.
We pick up habits from the people around us. We copy the way our parents handle arguments, the way our peers flirt with one another, the way our coworkers get results.
As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.
Our friends and family provide a sort of invisible peer pressure that pulls us in their direction.
When astronaut Mike Massimino was a graduate student at MIT, he took a small robotics class. Of the ten people in the class, four became astronauts. If your goal was to make it into space, then that room was about the best culture you could ask
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.
If you are surrounded by fit people, you’re more likely to consider working out to be a common habit. If you’re surrounded by jazz lovers, you’re more likely to believe it’s reasonable to play jazz every day. Your culture sets your expectation for what is “normal.”
Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one.
When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers. We are musicians. We are cyclists.
It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.
By the end of the experiment, nearly 75 percent of the subjects had agreed with the group answer even though it
Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior. We are constantly scanning our environment and wondering, “What is everyone else doing?”
Humans are similar. There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
You can override it—you can choose to ignore the group or to stop caring what other people think—but it takes work. Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort.
Historically, a person with greater power and status has access to more resources, worries less about survival, and proves to be a more attractive mate.
We want to be the one in the gym who can do muscle-ups or the musician who can play the hardest chord progressions or the parent with the most accomplished children because these things separate us from the crowd. Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.
This is one reason we care so much about the habits of highly effective people. We try to copy the behavior of successful people because we desire success ourselves. Many of our daily habits are imitations of people we admire. You replicate the marketing strategies of the most successful firms in your industry. You make a recipe from your favorite baker. You borrow the storytelling strategies of your favorite writer. You mimic the communication style of your boss. We imitate people we envy.
We trim our hedges and mow our lawn because we don’t want to be the slob of the neighborhood.
But these habits and behaviors maintained their attractiveness, in part, because they were valued by their culture.
The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us.
join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.
There were seven of us, and I was the only one who hadn’t, at some point, smoked at least one pack of cigarettes per day. I asked one of the Turks how he got started. “Friends,” he said. “It always starts with your friends. One friend smokes, then you try it.”
He systematically reframes each cue associated with smoking and gives it a new meaning.
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
At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and approval, or to achieve status.
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
Habits are all about associations. These associations determine whether we predict a habit to be worth repeating or
Our behavior is heavily dependent on these predictions. Put another way, our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
The same cue can spark a good habit or a bad habit depending on your prediction. The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them.
You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action. A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state. When the temperature falls, there is a gap between what your body is currently sensing and what it wants to be sensing. This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to
Neurologists have discovered that when emotions and feelings are impaired, we actually lose the ability to make decisions. We have no signal of what to pursue and what to avoid. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.”
the specific cravings you feel and habits you perform are really an attempt to address your fundamental underlying motives. Whenever a habit successfully addresses a motive, you develop a craving to do it again.
You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience.
The key point is that both versions of reality are true. You have to do those things, and you also get to do them. We can find evidence for whatever mind-set we choose.
You can just as easily view it as a way to develop skills and build you up. Instead of telling yourself “I need to go run in the morning,” say “It’s time to build endurance and get fast.”
living below your current means increases your future means. The money you save this month increases your purchasing power next month.
You can transform frustration into delight when you realize that each interruption gives you a chance to practice returning to your breath. Distraction is a good thing because you need distractions to practice meditation.
You can reframe “I am nervous” to “I am excited and I’m getting an adrenaline rush to help me concentrate.”
“My focus and concentration goes up just by putting my headphones [on] while writing. I don’t even have to play any music.” Without realizing it, he was conditioning himself. In the beginning, he put his headphones on, played some music he enjoyed, and did focused work. After doing it five, ten, twenty times, putting his headphones on became a cue that he automatically associated with increased focus. The craving followed naturally.
During my baseball career, I developed a specific ritual of stretching and throwing before each game. The whole sequence took about ten minutes, and I did it the same way every single time. While it physically warmed me up to play, more importantly, it put me in the right mental state.
Find something that makes you truly happy—like petting your dog or taking a bubble bath—and then create a short routine that you perform every time before you do the thing you love. Maybe you take three deep breaths and smile.
It becomes a cue that means feeling happy. Once established, you can break it out anytime you need to change your emotional state. Stressed at work? Take three deep breaths and smile. Sad about life? Three deep breaths and smile. Once a habit has been built, the cue can prompt a craving, even if it has little to do with the original situation.
reframe the associations you have about them.
The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. The prediction leads to a feeling.
Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.
At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group.
