More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
“To write a great book, you must first become the book.”
It’s the accumulation of many missteps—a 1 percent decline here and there—that eventually leads to a problem.
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.
“That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”
Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over the body in months.18 Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks.
In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.
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. But you know that it’s the work you did long ago—when it seemed that you weren’t making any progress—that makes the jump today possible.
“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.
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.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
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.
Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. 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.
When you have repeated a story to yourself for years, it is easy to slide into these mental grooves and accept them as a fact.
This is why you can’t get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.”5
It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
“What would a healthy person do?”
The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward.
Second, rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
The punch line is clear: people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through.
Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition, you get an urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can’t say why.
Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention. Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit.
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.
customers will occasionally buy products not because they want them but because of how they are presented to them.
Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships.
Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.
We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
Whenever you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.
Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
Behaviors are attractive when they help us fit in.
Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.
Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the group.
Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one.
Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior.
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.
Desire is the difference between where you are now and where you want to be in the future. Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. 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.
Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings, and we can use this insight to our advantage rather than to our detriment.
Now, imagine changing just one word: You don’t “have” to. You “get” to.4 You get to wake up early for work. You get to make another sales call for your business. You get to cook dinner for your family. By simply changing one word, you shift the way you view each event. You transition from seeing these behaviors as burdens and turn them into opportunities.
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.
Meditation. Anyone who has tried meditation for more than three seconds knows how frustrating it can be when the next distraction inevitably pops into your mind. You can transform frustration into delight when you realize that each interruption gives you a chance to practice returning to your breath. Distraction is a good thing because you need distractions to practice meditation.
