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Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn’t move much. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you.
It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.
Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It
The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.
The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.
The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious.
Strategies like implementation intentions and habit stacking are among the most practical ways to create obvious cues for your habits and design a clear plan for when and where to take action.
Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit.
One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
Temptation bundling is one way to create a heightened version of any habit by connecting it with something you already want.
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.
It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. 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.”
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.
If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.
Neuroscientists call this long-term potentiation, which refers to the strengthening of connections between neurons in the brain based on recent patterns of activity.
The Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it. As they subtracted wasted effort, they added customers and revenue. Similarly,
The human brain did not evolve for life in a delayed-return environment.
The best way to do this is to add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long-run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.
“The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily.”
Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the principle states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
genes do not determine your destiny. They determine your areas of opportunity.
Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.
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.
Periodic reflection and review is like viewing yourself in the mirror from a conversational distance. You can see the important changes you should make without losing sight of the bigger picture. You want to view the entire mountain range, not obsess over each peak and valley.
“keep your identity small.”10 The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you.
“If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change.”
Make it obvious. Make it attractive. Make it easy. Make it satisfying.
The source of all suffering is the desire for a change in state. This is also the source of all progress.
With craving, we are dissatisfied but driven. Without craving, we are satisfied but lack ambition.
