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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
July 18 - July 25, 2020
I believe the concepts in this book can help you fulfill your potential as well.
A sentence that clearly gets to the point. Explaining The clear benefit. Absolute Communication.
(Refer Book: Get to the point by Joel Schwartzberg)
changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
Brailsford said, “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.”
The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. 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. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.13 The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.
the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
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.
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.
Habits are a double-edged sword.15 Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up,
As Warren Buffett says, “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”
habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance.
If you find yourself struggling to build a good habit or break a bad one, it is not because you have lost your ability to improve. It is often because you have not yet crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential.
When you finally break through the Plateau of Latent Potential, people will call it an overnight success. The outside world only sees the most dramatic event rather than all that preceded it.
“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.”
Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.
In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
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.
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.
Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.
Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.
All levels of change are useful in their own way. The problem is the direction of change.
Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. 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 more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it.
Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
the word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”
New identities require new evidence. If you keep casting the same votes you’ve always cast, you’re going to get the same results you’ve always had. If nothing changes, nothing is going to change. It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
Once you have a handle on the type of person you want to be, you can begin taking small steps to reinforce your desired identity.
Identity change is the North Star of habit change.
Habits can help you achieve all of these things, but fundamentally they are not about having something. They are about becoming someone.
“behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.”
“Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
The primary reason the brain remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future.
Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom.
The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.
What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers. You do not crave smoking a cigarette, you crave the feeling of relief it provides.
For someone who rarely gambles, the jingles and chimes of the casino are just background noise. Cues are meaningless until they are interpreted. The thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the observer are what transform a cue into a craving.
The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action.
The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward. We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: (1) they satisfy us and (2) they teach us.
The Four Laws of Behavior Change are a simple set of rules we can use to build better habits. They are (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying.
If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for them. If you feel like you need extra help, then you can try Pointing-and-Calling in your own life. Say out loud the action that you are thinking of taking and what the outcome will be. If you want to cut back on your junk food habit but notice yourself grabbing another cookie, say out loud, “I’m about to eat this cookie, but I don’t need it. Eating it will cause me to gain weight and hurt my health.”
The Habits Scorecard is a simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior.
people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
An implementation intention sweeps away foggy notions like “I want to work out more” or “I want to be more productive” or “I should vote” and transforms them into a concrete plan of action. Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.
