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changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.
Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line.
Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it.
Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.19 Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”
a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.
Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.
You may want more money, but if your identity is someone who consumes rather than creates, then you’ll continue to be pulled toward spending rather than earning.
You may want better health, but if you continue to prioritize comfort over accomplishment, you’ll be drawn to relaxing rather than training.
“Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future.
your brain begins noticing what is important, sorting through the details and highlighting the relevant cues, and cataloging that information for future use.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets us to take action.
Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
I once heard a story about a man who uses a wheelchair. When asked if it was difficult being confined, he responded, “I’m not confined to my wheelchair—I am liberated by it.5 If it wasn’t for my wheelchair, I would be bed-bound and never able to leave my house.” This shift in perspective completely transformed how he lived each day.
“The best is the enemy of the good.”
When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.
If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.
Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do.
habit can be completed in just a few seconds, but it can also shape the actions that you take for minutes or hours afterward.
the habits you follow without thinking often determine the choices you make when you are thinking.3
You have to standardize before you can optimize.
Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.
“Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”7
What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action,
the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.fn3
the last mile is always the least crowded.
Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you.
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
The mark of whether you are made for a task is not whether you love it but whether you can handle the pain of the task easier than most people.
good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.
humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you.
Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.
