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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.
“To write a great book, you must first become the book.”
The backbone of this book is my four-step model of habits—cue, craving, response, and reward—and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps.
operant conditioning, which was first proposed as “stimulus, response, reward” by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s
Skinner’s model did an excellent job of explaining how external stimuli influenced our habits, it lacked a good explanation for how our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs impact our behavior. Internal states—our moods and emotions—matter, too.
if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
A single decision is easy to dismiss.
a slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination.
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success.
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with...
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You get what you repeat.
The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.16
Learning one new idea won’t make you a genius, but a commitment to lifelong learning can be transformative.
each book you read not only teaches you something new but also opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas.
The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way.
The same is true for how you think about others.
Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those...
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Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.
You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months.
It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.
Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heated it from twenty-five to thirty-one degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored.
The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.
“The score takes care of itself.”
Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.
We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results.
When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily.
Fix the inputs and the outputs will f...
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The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.
Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Habits are like the atoms of our lives.
Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run.
Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way.
Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.
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.
Most people don’t even consider identity change when they set out to improve.
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.
Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.
Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
a person believes in a particular aspect of their identity, they are more likely to act in alignment with that belief.
Once you have adopted an identity, it can be easy to let your allegiance to it impact your ability to change.
Many people walk through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity.
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.
Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way. This is why you can’t get too attached to one version of your identity.
