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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
April 19 - July 11, 2019
“I begin each day of my life with a ritual,” she writes. “I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweat shirt, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours.
the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.
It reduces the chance that I would skip it or do it differently. It is one more item in my arsenal of routines, and one less thing to think about.”
a habit can be completed in just a few seconds, but it can also shape the actions that you take for minutes or hours afterward.
It seems to be easier to continue what you are already doing than to start doing something different. You sit through a bad movie for two hours.
In this way, the habits you follow without thinking often determine the choices you make when you are thinking.
Similar to Twyla Tharp hailing the cab, the ritual is changing into my workout clothes. If I change clothes, I know the workout will happen.
Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments.
walking into a restaurant is a decisive moment because it determines what you’ll be eating for lunch.
Each day is made up of many moments, but it is really a few habitual choices that determine the path you take. These little choices stack up, each one setting the trajectory for how you spend the next chunk of time.
The most effective way I know to counteract this tendency is to use the Two-Minute Rule, which states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”
A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. What you want is a “gateway habit” that naturally leads you down a more productive path.
And putting on your running shoes is very easy. Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes. That’s how you follow the Two-Minute Rule.
The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. 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.
