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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
May 25 - June 13, 2020
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.
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.
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
Important
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.
Important
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.
Important!
“That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”
This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop.
But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.
Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
Important
“The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals.
Focus on your system instead.
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
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Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement.
goals create an “either-or” conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness.
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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.
But atomic habits are not just any old habits, however small.
Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.
Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.
Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits.
With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.
Important
Most people don’t even consider identity change when they set out to improve.
Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.
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 read a book, the goal is to become a reader.
Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity.
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Research has shown that once a person believes in a particular aspect of their identity, they are more likely to act in alignment with that belief.
When you have repeated a story to yourself for years, it is easy to slide into these mental grooves and accept them as a fact.
There is internal pressure to maintain your self-image and behave in a way that is consistent with your beliefs. You find whatever way you can to avoid contradicting yourself.
The biggest barrier to positive change at any level—individual, team, society—is identity conflict.
Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
The more evidence you have for a belief, the more strongly you will believe it.
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.
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Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
Identity change is the North Star of habit change.
Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. It’s not about flossing one tooth each night or taking a cold shower each morning or wearing the same outfit each day.
“Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.
If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks—when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills—then you have less time for freedom.
The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.*
What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers.
You do not crave smoking a cigarette, you crave the feeling of relief it provides.
Important
If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit.
We can split these four steps into two phases: the problem phase and the solution phase.
By the time we become adults, we rarely notice the habits that are running our lives.
It’s also what makes them dangerous. As habits form, your actions come under the direction of your automatic and nonconscious mind.
Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones.
