Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

by James Clear

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Whenever we are preparing to walk out the door for a trip, she verbally calls out the most essential items in her packing list. “I’ve got my keys. I’ve got my wallet. I’ve got my glasses. I’ve got my husband.”

Shaming obese people with weight-loss presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating.

For years, scientists assumed dopamine was all about pleasure, but now we know it plays a central role in many neurological processes, including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion, and voluntary movement.

“In learning to speak a new language, to play on a musical instrument, or to perform unaccustomed movements, great difficulty is felt, because the channels through which each sensation has to pass have not become established; but no sooner has frequent repetition cut a pathway, than this difficulty vanishes; the actions become so automatic that they can be performed while the mind is otherwise engaged.”

When you dream about making a change, excitement inevitably takes over and you end up trying to do too much too soon.

Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.

Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits.”

The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows.

The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.

Genes have been shown to influence everything from the number of hours you spend watching television to your likelihood to marry or divorce to your tendency to get addicted to drugs, alcohol, or nicotine.

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.

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.

Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.

Each chunk of information that is memorized opens up the mental space for more effortful thinking.

The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.

One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are.

When you spend your whole life defining yourself in one way and that disappears, who are you now?