More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
July 18 - July 25, 2020
the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.
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.
People often choose products not because of what they are, but because of where they are.
many of the actions we take each day are shaped not by purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.
It’s easy not to practice the guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet. It’s easy not to read a book when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room. It’s easy not to take your vitamins when they are out of sight in the pantry. When the cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.
Environment design allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life. Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
Trying to eat healthier? It is likely that you shop on autopilot at your regular supermarket. Try a new grocery store. You may find it easier to avoid unhealthy food when your brain doesn’t automatically know where it is located in the store.
You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks, which makes it a powerful device. But when you can use your phone to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task.
Seperating the use of various devices.
A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is an environment where habits can easily form.
“disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
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.
Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the environmental cues reappear.
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, you feel bad.
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.
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.
Entire departments are dedicated to optimizing how a product feels in your mouth—a quality known as orosensation.
Thats crazy and smart.
After a few minutes, your brain loses interest and you begin to feel full. But foods that are high in dynamic contrast keep the experience novel and interesting, encouraging you to eat more.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop.14 Every behavior that is highly habit-forming—taking drugs, eating junk food, playing video games, browsing social media—is associated with higher levels of dopamine. The same can be said for our most basic habitual behaviors like eating food, drinking water, having sex, and interacting socially.
dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.
Interestingly, the reward system that is activated in the brain when you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward.18 This is one reason the anticipation of an experience can often feel better than the attainment of it.
We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place. This is where a strategy known as temptation bundling comes into play.
he wrote a computer program that would allow Netflix to run only if he was cycling at a certain speed. If he slowed down for too long, whatever show he was watching would pause until he started pedaling again. He was, in the words of one fan, “eliminating obesity one Netflix binge at a time.”
Temptation bundling is one way to create a heightened version of any habit by connecting it with something you already want.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine rises, so does our motivation to act.
Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find.
We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them. We follow the script handed down by our friends and family, our church or school, our local community and society at large.
We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:2 The close. The many. The powerful.
Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. 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.
High-status people enjoy the approval, respect, and praise of others. And that means if a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.
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
A craving is the sense that something is missing.
Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future.
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.
“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.
Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.
Instead of telling yourself “I need to go run in the morning,” say “It’s time to build endurance and get fast.”6
Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.
Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”
When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning.
Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action.
If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.
Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. This means that simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit.
Habits like scrolling on our phones, checking email, and watching television steal so much of our time because they can be performed almost without effort. They are remarkably convenient.
If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.
addition by subtraction.5 fn2 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.
Lean production method
