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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
May 26 - June 8, 2023
changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
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.
The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.
Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely the result of a single event. Instead, a long series of microaggressions and daily aggravations slowly multiply until one event tips the scales and outrage spreads like wildfire.
Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.
The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.
an identity behind the habits.
The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.
A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.
As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you’re likely to be occupied with something else.
People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.
Despite our unique personalities, certain behaviors tend to arise again and again under certain environmental conditions. In church, people tend to talk in whispers.
the cleaning staff at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam installed a small sticker that looked like a fly near the center of each urinal. Apparently, when men stepped up to the urinals, they aimed for what they thought was a bug. The stickers improved their aim
and significantly reduced “spillage” around the urinals. Further analysis determined that the stickers cut bathroom cleaning costs by 8 percent per year.
Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the
right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.
It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.
Today, however, we live in a calorie-rich environment. Food is abundant, but your brain continues to crave it like it is scarce.
Companies spend millions of dollars to discover the most satisfying level of crunch in a potato chip or the perfect amount of fizz in a soda.
The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. For example, one study found that when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.
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 cro...
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Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.
Now, imagine changing just one word: You don’t “have” to. You “get” to.
When asked if it was difficult being confined, he responded, “I’m not confined to my wheelchair—I am liberated by it. If it wasn’t for my wheelchair, I would be bed-bound and never able to leave my house.”
workers three times as long to assemble their sets.” I like to refer to this strategy as addition by subtraction.* The Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it. As they subtracted wasted effort, they added customers and revenue.
“Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.” “Do thirty minutes of yoga” becomes “Take out my yoga mat.” “Study for class” becomes “Open my notes.” “Fold the laundry” becomes “Fold one pair of socks.” “Run three miles” becomes “Tie my running shoes.”
And after thousands of generations in an immediate-return environment, our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones.
Why would someone smoke if they know it increases the risk of lung cancer? Why would someone overeat when they know it increases their risk of obesity? Why would someone have unsafe sex if they know it can result in sexually transmitted disease? Once you understand how the brain prioritizes rewards, the answers become clear: the consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate.
Put another way, the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
If you start with $100, then a 50 percent gain will take you to $150. But you only need a 33 percent loss to take you back to $100. In other words, avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain.
In fact, if you’re only measuring revenue, the food might be getting worse but you’re making up for it with marketing or discounts or some other method. Instead, it may be more effective to track how many customers finish their meal or perhaps the percentage of customers who leave a generous tip.
keep exploring with the remaining 10 to 20 percent. Google famously asks employees to spend 80 percent of the workweek on their official job and 20 percent on projects of their choice, which has led to the creation of blockbuster products like AdWords and Gmail.
I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.”
Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can’t control whether you’re a potato or an egg,
But stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.
When you can do it “good enough” on autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better.
Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
Self-control requires you to release a desire rather than satisfy
“Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more.”
