Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

by James Clear

A habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly—and, in many cases, automatically.

changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.

in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.

“To write a great book, you must first become the book.”

Anything wise in these pages you should credit to the many experts who preceded me. Anything foolish, assume it is my error.

“the aggregation of marginal gains,” which was the philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do.

It is so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis.

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

This can be a difficult concept to appreciate in daily life. We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter very much in the moment.

the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide.

The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees.

Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.

You get what you repeat.

Accomplishing one extra task is a small feat on any given day, but it counts for a lot over an entire career.

People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others want to help you.

Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions,

Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks.

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 doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a ...

You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside.

The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it. But you know that it’s the work you did long ago—when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress—that makes the jump today possible.

Change can take years—before it happens all at once.

Mastery requires patience.

The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.

I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.

Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million-dollar business. Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.

If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.

Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.

The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.

Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.

Imagine you have a messy room and you set a g...

You’re left chasing the same outcome because you never changed the system behind it.

What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.

Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness.

The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.

It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out.

A systems-first mentality provides the antidote. When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And a system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.

Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress.

When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits after accomplishing a goal.

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 a...

Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will dete...

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Focusing on the overall system, rather than a single goal, is one of the core themes of this book.

But atomic habits are not just any old habits, however small. They are little habits that are part of a larger system.