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People who are better at delaying gratification have higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, and superior social skills.
In the beginning, you need a reason to stay on track.
Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress.
“Don’t break the chain” is a powerful mantra.
The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it.
The most effective form of motivation is progress.
habit tracking can have an addictive effect on motivation. Each small win feeds your desire.
habit tracking (1) creates a visual cue that can remind you to act, (2) is inherently motivating because you see the progress you are making and don’t want to lose it, and (3) feels satisfying whenever you record another successful instance of your habit. Furthermore, habit tracking provides visual proof that you are casting votes for the type of person you wish to become, which is a delightful form of immediate and intrinsic gratification.
Tracking isn’t for everyone, and there is no need to measure your entire life.
But nearly anyone can benefit from it in some form—even if it’s only temporary.
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you.7 It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident.8 Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits.
the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.
If you start with $100, then a 50 percent gain will take you to $150. But you only need a 33 percent loss to take you back to $100. In other words, avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain.
Charlie Munger says, “The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.”
This is why the “bad” workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. Simply doing something—ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything really—is huge...
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It’s easy to train when you feel good, but it’s crucial to show up when you don’t feel like it—even if you do less than you hope.
five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity. The all-or-nothing cycle of behavior change is just one pitfall that can derail your habits.
The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.
embracing crash diets, juice cleanses, and fat-loss pills. The human mind wants to “win” whatever game is being played.
we optimize for what we measure. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system.
If you’re going to rely on punishment to change behavior, then the strength of the punishment must match the relative strength of the behavior it is trying to correct.
Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced.
We are less likely to repeat a bad habit if it is painful or unsatisfying.
if you want to be truly great, selecting the right place to focus is crucial.
genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
The key is to direct your effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills, to align your ambition with your ability.
Robert Plomin, a behavioral geneticist at King’s College in London, told me, “It is now at the point where we have stopped testing to see if traits have a genetic component because we literally can’t find a single one that isn’t influenced by our genes.”
Your personality is the set of characteristics that is consistent from situation to situation.
people who are more sensitive to negative cues in their environment are more likely to score high in neuroticism.
You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.
Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.
If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.
As you explore different options, there are a series of questions you can ask yourself
What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
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.
When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.
A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.
If you can find a more favorable environment, you can transform the situation from one where the odds are against you to one where they are in your favor.
Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.
the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.”
humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
Once a habit has been established, however, it’s important to continue to advance in small ways.
Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
Machiavelli noted, “Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.”
Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.
