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Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.
when emotions and feelings are impaired, we actually lose the ability to make decisions.
Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings, and we can use this insight to our advantage rather than to our detriment.
Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.
You can transform frustration into delight when you realize that each interruption gives you a chance to practice returning to your breath.
You can reframe “I am nervous” to “I am excited and I’m getting an adrenaline rush to help me concentrate.”7
It’s not easy, but if you can reprogram your predictions, you can transform a hard habit into an attractive one.
Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive.
We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself.
motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.
biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something.
You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.
If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetit...
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you just need to get your reps in.
The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity. Neuroscientists call this long-term potentiation, which refers to the strengthening of connections between neurons in the brain based on recent patterns of activity.
Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a form of change.9
All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice to automatic behavior, a process known as automaticity.
The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.
The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.
Energy is precious, and the brain is wired to conserve it whenever possible. It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort,
The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.
Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life.
making your habits simple and easy is like removing the bend in the hose. Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.
successful companies design their products to automate, eliminate, or simplify as many steps as possible.
Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.
Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy.
The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.
“How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?”
The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start.
A new habit should not feel like a challenge.
the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved.
Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis.
You have to standardize before you can optimize.
combine the Two-Minute Rule with a technique we call habit shaping to scale your habit back up toward your ultimate goal.8
Whenever you are struggling to stick with a habit, you can employ the Two-Minute Rule.
The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
When you automate as much of your life as possible, you can spend your effort on the tasks machines cannot do yet.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
When the effort required to act on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping into whatever impulse arises at the moment.
automation can make your good habits inevitable and your bad habits impossible. It is the ultimate way to lock in future behavior rather than relying on willpower in the moment. By utilizing commitment devices, strategic onetime decisions, and technology, you can create an environment of inevitability—a space where good habits are not just an outcome you hope for but an outcome that is virtually guaranteed.
The human brain did not evolve for life in a delayed-return environment.
Every habit produces multiple outcomes across time. Unfortunately, these outcomes are often misaligned. With our bad habits, the immediate outcome usually feels good, but the ultimate outcome feels bad.
With good habits, it is the reverse: the immediate outcome is unenjoyable, but the ultimate outcome feels good.
the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
The brain’s tendency to prioritize the present moment means you can’t rely on good intentions.
We all want better lives for our future selves. However, when the moment of decision arrives, instant gratification usually wins.
As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.
