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

by James Clear

With the same habits, you’ll end up with the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible.

Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

The San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful teams in NBA history, have a quote from social reformer Jacob Riis hanging in their locker room: “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.19 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.”

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.

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 this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.

As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”9