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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
January 1 - January 4, 2023
The more evidence you have for a belief, the more strongly you will believe it.
your habits are not the only actions that influence your identity, but by virtue of their frequency they are usually the most important ones.
We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit.6 We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it actually is big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.
habits are the path to changing your identity. The most practical way to change who you ar...
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Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things.
it works the opposite way, too. Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it’s a vote for that identity.
It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
“What would a healthy person do?” All day long, she would use this question as a guide.
the true question is: “Are you becoming the type of person you want to become?”
The first step is not what or how, but who.
Habits can help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.
Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.
There are three levels of change: outcome change, process change, and identity change. ■ The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become. ■ Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. ■ Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity. ■ The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results (although they can do that), but because they can change your beliefs
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A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.
“Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases.6 You learn to lock in on the cues that predict success and tune out everything else.
Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience. In a sense, a habit is just a memory of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in the past.
Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain.8 It can only pay attention to one problem at a time.
Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.
Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.
If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks—when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills—then you have less time for freedom.
Feelings of pleasure and disappointment are part of the feedback mechanism that helps your brain distinguish useful actions from useless ones.
Every goal is doomed to fail if it goes against the grain of human
A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. ■ The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible. ■ Any habit can be broken down into a feedback loop that involves four steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. ■ The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.
The human brain is a prediction machine.5 It is continuously taking in your surroundings and analyzing the information it comes across.
Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones. This can be more challenging than it sounds because once a habit is firmly rooted in your life, it is mostly nonconscious and automatic. If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Pointing-and-Calling is so effective because it raises the level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level.
Many of our failures in performance are largely attributable to a lack of self-awareness.
The labels “good habit” and “bad habit” are slightly inaccurate. There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits.
All habits serve you in some way—even the bad ones—which is why you repeat them.
If you’re still having trouble determining how to rate a particular habit, here is a question I like to use: “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?”
The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for them. If you feel like you need extra help, then you can try Pointing-and-Calling in your own life. Say out loud the action that you are thinking of taking and what the outcome will be. If you want to cut back on your junk food habit but notice yourself grabbing another cookie, say out loud, “I’m about to eat this cookie, but I don’t need it. Eating it will cause me to gain weight and hurt my health.”
The process of behavior change always starts with awareness.
With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. ■ Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to what we are doing. ■ The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You need to be aware of your habits before you can change them. ■ Pointing-and-Calling raises your level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level by verbalizing your actions. ■ The Habits Scorecard is a simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior.
implementation intention,
Broadly speaking, the format for creating an implementation intention is: “When situation X arises, I will perform response
The punch line is clear: people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
Once an implementation intention has been set, you don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike.
■ Meditation. I will meditate for one minute at 7 a.m. in my kitchen.
If you aren’t sure when to start your habit, try the first day of the week, month, or year. People are more likely to take action at those times because hope is usually higher.8 If we have hope, we have a reason to take action. A fresh start feels motivating.
There is another benefit to implementation intentions. Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course. We often say yes to little requests because we are not clear enough about what we need to be doing instead. When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.
The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right thing at the r...
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The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
Many human behaviors follow this cycle. You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing.
Once you get comfortable with this approach, you can develop general habit stacks to guide you whenever the situation is appropriate: ■ Exercise. When I see a set of stairs, I will take them instead of using the elevator. ■ Social skills. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I don’t know yet. ■ Finances. When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait twenty-four hours before purchasing. ■ Healthy eating. When I serve myself a meal, I will always put veggies on my plate first. ■ Minimalism. When I buy a new item, I will give something away. (“One in, one out.”16) ■
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But soon, I realized the trigger was unclear. Would I do my push-ups before I ate lunch? After I ate lunch? Where would I do them? After a few inconsistent days, I changed my habit stack to: “When I close my laptop for lunch, I will do ten push-ups next to my desk.” Ambiguity gone.
Be specific and clear: After I close the door. After I brush my teeth. After I sit down at the table. The specificity is important. The more tightly bound your new habit is to a specific cue, the better the odds are that you will notice when the time comes to act.
The 1st Law of Behavior Change is make it obvious. ■ The two most common cues are time and location. ■ Creating an implementation intention is a strategy you can use to pair a new habit with a specific time and location. ■ The implementation intention formula is: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]. ■ Habit stacking is a strategy you can use to pair a new habit with a current habit. ■ The habit stacking formula is: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].
