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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
January 1 - January 4, 2023
“Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort.
When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.
Specialization is a powerful way to overcome the “accident” of bad genetics.
Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can’t control whether you’re a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it’s better to be hard or soft. 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.
People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.
Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.
Work hard on the things that come easy.
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition. ■ Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle. ■ Genes cannot be easily changed, which means they provide a powerful advantage in favorable circumstances and a serious disadvantage in unfavorable circumstances. ■ Habits are easier when they align with your natural abilities. Choose the habits that best suit you. ■ Play a game that favors your strengths. If you can’t find a game that favors you, create one. ■ Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They
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Why is it that some people, like Martin, stick with their habits—whether practicing jokes or drawing cartoons or playing guitar—while most of us struggle to stay motivated?
one of the most consistent findings is that the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of “just manageable difficulty.”3 The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.
The Goldilocks Rule states that 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. These little improvements and new challenges keep you engaged. And if you hit the Goldilocks Zone just right, you can achieve a flow state.
Improvement requires a delicate balance. You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated. Behaviors need to remain novel in order for them to stay attractive and satisfying. Without variety, we get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.
“At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”
this coach was saying that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
As 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.”6 Perhaps this is why many of the most habit-forming products are those that provide continuous forms of novelty. Video games provide visual novelty. Porn provides sexual novelty. Junk foods provide culinary novelty. Each of these experiences offer continual elements of surprise. In psychology, this is known as a variable reward.
The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and failure.
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.
Professionals take action even when the mood isn’t right. They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.
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.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. ■ The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. ■ As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. We get bored. ■ Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It’s the ability to keep going when work isn’t exciting that makes the difference. ■ Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
Each chunk of information that is memorized opens up the mental space for more effortful thinking.
The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors.
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
after one habit has been mastered, you have to return to the effortful part of the work and begin building the next habit.
habits are powerful, what you need is a way to remain conscious of your performance over time, so you can continue to refine and improve. It is precisely at the moment when you begin to feel like you have mastered a skill
“improve their output by at least 1 percent over the course of the season. If they succeeded, it would be a CBE, or Career Best Effort.”
The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time.”
Improvement is not just about learning habits, it’s also about fine-tuning them. Reflection and review ensures that you spend your time on the right things and make course corrections whenever necessary
Annual Review,
What went well this year? What didn’t go so well this year? What did I learn?
Integrity Report.
What are the core values that drive my life and work? How am I living and working with integrity right now? How can I set a higher standard in the future?
Reflection can also bring a sense of perspective. Daily habits are powerful because of how they compound, but worrying too much about every daily choice is like looking at yourself in the mirror from an inch away. You can see every imperfection and lose sight of the bigger picture. There is too much feedback. Conversely, never reviewing your habits is like never looking in the mirror. You aren’t aware of easily fixable flaws—a spot on your shirt, a bit of food in your teeth. There is too little feedback.
The more sacred an idea is to us—that is, the more deeply it is tied to our identity—the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.
When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.
The key to mitigating these losses of identity is to redefine yourself such that you get to keep important aspects of your identity even if your particular role changes.
Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard. Plants are born tender and pliant; dead, they are brittle and dry. Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Whoever is soft and yielding is a disciple of life. The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. —LAO TZU
The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside is that we stop paying attention to little errors. ■ Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery ■ Reflection and review is a process that allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time. ■ The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.
THERE IS AN ancient Greek parable known as the Sorites Paradox,fn1 which talks about the effect one small action can have when repeated enough times. One formulation of the paradox goes as follows: Can one coin make a person rich? If you give a person a pile of ten coins, you wouldn’t claim that he or she is rich. But what if you add another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him or her so.1 We can say the same about atomic habits.
The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them. It’s a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.
Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.
The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.
