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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
James Clear
Read between
July 18 - July 25, 2020
The central idea is to create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.
The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.
Reduce the friction associated with good behaviors. When friction is low, habits are easy. ■ Increase the friction associated with bad behaviors. When friction is high, habits are difficult.
Every day, there are a handful of moments that deliver an outsized impact. I refer to these little choices as decisive moments.4 The moment you decide between ordering takeout or cooking dinner. The moment you choose between driving your car or riding your bike. The moment you decide between starting your homework or grabbing the video game controller. These choices are a fork in the road.
Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes. That’s how you follow the Two-Minute Rule.
As you master the art of showing up, the first two minutes simply become a ritual at the beginning of a larger routine.
Greg McKeown, a leadership consultant from the United Kingdom, built a daily journaling habit by specifically writing less than he felt like. He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle.7 Ernest Hemingway believed in similar advice for any kind of writing. “The best way is to always stop when you are going good,” he said.
Start by mastering the first two minutes of the smallest version of the behavior. Then, advance to an intermediate step and repeat the process—focusing on just the first two minutes and mastering that stage before moving on to the next level. Eventually, you’ll end up with the habit you had originally hoped to build while still keeping your focus where it should be: on the first two minutes of the behavior.
Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard. This is an inversion of the 3rd Law of Behavior Change: make it difficult.
The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
North Whitehead wrote, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
The ultimate way to lock in future behavior is to automate your habits.
A reward that is certain right now is typically worth more than one that is merely possible in the future. But occasionally, our bias toward instant gratification causes problems.
The more a habit becomes part of your life, the less you need outside encouragement to follow through. Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
change is easy when it is enjoyable.
The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
“Don’t break the chain” is a powerful mantra. Don’t break the chain of sales calls and you’ll build a successful book of business. Don’t break the chain of workouts and you’ll get fit faster than you’d expect. Don’t break the chain of creating every day and you will end up with an impressive portfolio.
When you look at the calendar and see your streak, you’ll be reminded to act again.
Each small win feeds your desire.
The first mistake is never the one that ruins you.7 It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident.8 Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
when successful people fail, they rebound quickly.
An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction. We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.
habit contract can be used to add a social cost to any behavior. It makes the costs of violating your promises public and painful.
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
16 If you want to read more, don’t be embarrassed if you prefer steamy romance novels over nonfiction. Read whatever fascinates you.fn2 You don’t have to build the habits everyone tells you to build. Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.
genes can’t make you successful if you’re not doing the work.
Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.
A flow state is the experience of being “in the zone” and fully immersed in an activity. Scientists have tried to quantify this feeling. They found that to achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability.
“At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”
Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
It’s the ability to keep going when work isn’t exciting that makes the difference.
reflection and review offers an ideal time to revisit one of the most important aspects of behavior change: identity.
The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.
You want to push your good habits toward the left side of the spectrum by making them obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Meanwhile, you want to cluster your bad habits toward the right side by making them invisible, unattractive, hard, and unsatisfying.
get 1 percent better.
German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior. As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.”
With craving, we are dissatisfied but driven. Without craving, we are satisfied but lack ambition.
“Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.”
