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

by James Clear

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

“cue, routine, reward” in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.3, 4

Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done.12 Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero.

It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.

Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York.

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

You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results. If

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.

Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.

habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau—what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.

In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.

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 and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.

The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become.

The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It’s one thing to say I’m the type of person who wants this. It’s something very different to say I’m the type of person who is this.

The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome.

There are three levels of change: outcome change, process change, and identity change.

The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results (although they can do that), but because they can change your beliefs about yourself.

“behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.

Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience. In a sense, a habit is just a memory of the steps you previously followed to solve a problem in the past.

Building habits in the present allows you to do more of what you want in the future.

Pointing-and-Calling raises your level of awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level by verbalizing your actions.

The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.

The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already do each day. Once you have mastered this basic structure, you can begin to create larger stacks by chaining small habits together.

In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f (P,E).

Hawkins Stern described a phenomenon he called Suggestion Impulse Buying, which “is triggered when a shopper sees a product for the first time and visualizes a need for it.”

But you can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative

So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

In the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

If you’re continually feeling like you’re not enough, stop following social media accounts that trigger jealousy and envy.

Remove a single cue and the entire habit often fades away.

Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.

People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.

Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.

Advertisements are created with a combination of ideal lighting, professional makeup, and Photoshopped edits—even the model doesn’t look like the person in the final image.

Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.

We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:2 The close. The many. The powerful.

Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.

Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort.

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.

We are drawn to behaviors that earn us respect, approval, admiration, and status.

Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.

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.

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

Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.

You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.

This is the first takeaway of the 3rd Law: you just need to get your reps in.