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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
January 1 - January 4, 2023
whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find.
We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.
We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:2 The close. The many. The powerful.
Of course, peer pressure is bad only if you’re surrounded by bad influences.
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.
Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one.
When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit.
Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior.
The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual.
Humans are similar. There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group.
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.
Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige, and status. We want pins and medallions on our jackets. We want President or Partner in our titles. We want to be acknowledged, recognized, and praised. This tendency can seem vain, but overall, it’s a smart move. Historically, a person with greater power and status has access to more resources, worries less about survival, and proves to be a more attractive mate.
The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us. ■ We tend to adopt habits that are praised and approved of by our culture because we have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe. ■ We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe), and the powerful (those with status and prestige). ■ One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group. ■ The normal
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A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. Your brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or to check Instagram or to play video games. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and approval, or to achieve status.
Look at nearly any product that is habit-forming and you’ll see that it does not create a new motivation, but rather latches onto the underlying motives of human nature. ■ Find love and reproduce = using Tinder ■ Connect and bond with others = browsing Facebook ■ Win social acceptance and approval = posting on Instagram ■ Reduce uncertainty = searching on Google ■ Achieve status and prestige = playing video games
Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use. Once you associate a solution with the problem you need to solve, you keep coming back to it.
Every time you perceive a cue, your brain runs a simulation and makes a prediction about what to do in the next moment.
You see a cue, categorize it based on past experience, and determine the appropriate response.
Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive.
our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving—a feeling, a desire, an urge.
You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action.
A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state.
This gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act.
Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.
Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings, and we can use this insight to our advantage rather than to our detriment.
The key point is that both versions of reality are true. You have to do those things, and you also get to do them. We can find evidence for whatever mind-set we choose.
living below your current means increases your future means.
You can transform frustration into delight when you realize that each interruption gives you a chance to practice returning to your breath.
These little mind-set shifts aren’t magic, but they can help change the feelings you associate with a particular habit or situation.
Ed Latimore, a boxer and writer from Pittsburgh, benefited from a similar strategy without knowing it.8 “Odd realization,” he wrote. “My focus and concentration goes up just by putting my headphones [on] while writing. I don’t even have to play any music.”
he was conditioning himself. In the beginning, he put his headphones on, played some music he enjoyed, and did focused work. After doing it five, ten, twenty times, putting his headphones on became a cue that he automatically associated with increased focus.
if you can reprogram your predictions, you can transform a hard habit into an attractive one.
The inversion of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change is make it unattractive. ■ Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper underlying motive. ■ Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. ■ The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them. The prediction leads to a feeling. ■ Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive. ■ Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings and unattractive when we associate them with negative feelings. Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately
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We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”
the difference between being in motion and taking action.
But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.
When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something.
If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.
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.3 With each repetition, cell-to-cell signaling improves and the neural connections tighten.
“Neurons that fire together wire together.”
Like the muscles of the body responding to regular weight training, particular regions of the brain adapt as they are used and atrophy as they are abandoned.
Both common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a form of change.
This means that simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit.
a process known as automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step, which occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over.
habits form based on frequency, not time.
does it take to build a new habit?” But what people really should be asking is, “How many does it take to form a new habit?”
You could do something twice in thirty days, or two hundred times. It’s the frequency that makes the difference. Your current habits have been internalized over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of repetitions. New habits require the same level of frequency.
