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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
January 2 - February 5, 2023
Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others want to help you. Being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a network of broad and strong connections over time.
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”
A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.
Winners and losers have the same goals.
solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you do is an indication of the type of person you believe that you are—either consciously or nonconsciously.
when your behavior and your identity are fully aligned, you are no longer pursuing behavior change. You are simply acting like the type of person you already believe yourself to be.
Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”
the process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.
You don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.
The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become.
the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain.
Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state.
Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
“Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?” Habits that reinforce your desired identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired identity are usually bad.
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.
No behavior happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior. Despite our unique personalities, certain behaviors tend to arise again and again under certain environmental conditions.
When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.
when you step outside your normal environment, you leave your behavioral biases behind.
computer only for writing, his tablet only for reading, and his phone only for social media and texting. Every habit should have a home. If you can manage to stick with this strategy, each context will become associated with a particular habit and mode of thought.
If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable. A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form.
To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment. A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.
The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual.
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.
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
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.
Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper underlying motive.
we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.
every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want. Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit. Meditation is an obstacle to feeling calm. Journaling is an obstacle to thinking clearly. You don’t actually want the habit itself. What you really want is the outcome the habit delivers.
As they subtracted wasted effort, they added customers and revenue. Similarly, when we remove the points of friction that sap our time and energy, we can achieve more with less effort.
The point is to master the habit of showing up. 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.
ONETIME ACTIONS THAT LOCK IN GOOD HABITS
Each habit that we hand over to the authority of technology frees up time and energy to pour into the next stage of growth.
Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating.
What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided. You learn what to do in the future based on what you were rewarded for doing (or punished for doing) in the past. Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.
the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
we optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.
Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced. In general, the more local, tangible, concrete, and immediate the consequence, the more likely it is to influence individual behavior.
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition. This is just as true with habit change as it is with sports and business.
When our environment changes, so do the qualities that determine success.
the truly great among us are the ones who not only work hard but also have the good fortune to be exposed to opportunities that favor us.
Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
never reviewing your habits is like never looking in the mirror. You aren’t aware of easily fixable flaws—a
