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changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
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.
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.
Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
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.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. 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.
is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”9
Strategies like Pointing-and-Calling and the Habits Scorecard are focused on getting you to recognize your habits and acknowledge the cues that trigger them, which makes it possible to respond in a way that benefits you.
people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.14
Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.
our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
“It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.”
The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it.
The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.
Commitment devices increase the odds that you’ll do the right thing in the future by making bad habits difficult in the present.
The French economist Frédéric Bastiat explained the problem clearly when he wrote, “It almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa
Simply doing something—ten squats, five sprints, a push-up, anything really—is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding.
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.
Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can make your habits satisfying by providing clear evidence of your progress.
To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them painful in the moment. Creating a habit contract is a straightforward way to do exactly that.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.
The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.
A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
