Book - Atomic Habits

Atomic Habits

1. Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you are willing to stick with them for years.

   1. We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
   2. With the same habits, you will end up with the same results.
   3. But with better habits, anything is possible.

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

   1. It does not matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now.
   2. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success.
   3. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory that with your current results.

3. Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.

   1. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits.
   2. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits.
   3. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits.
   4. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits.
   5. You get what you repeat.

   If you want to predict where you will end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line.

4. Mastery requires patience.

   1. The San Antonio Spurs, one of the most successful teams in NBA history, have a quote from social reformer Jacob Riis hanging in their locker room :

      ‘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. 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.’

5. On any given day, you may struggle with your habits because you are too busy or too tired or too overwhelmed or hundreds of other reasons.

   1. However, over the long run, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way.
   2. This is why you cannot get too attached to one version of your identity.
   3. Progress requires unlearning.
   4. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.

6. Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones.

   1. This can be more challenging than it sounds because once a habit is firmly rooted in your life, it is mostly non-conscious and automatic.
   2. It a habit remains mindless, you cannot expect to improve it.
   3. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, ‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate’.

7. If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.

   See Environment design - Impact on Focus and Habits

8. It is hard to stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

   See Environment design - Impact on Focus and Habits

9. Your culture sets your expectation for what is normal. Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You will rise together.

   1. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day.
   2. If you are surrounded by fit people, you are more likely to consider working out to be a common habit.
   3. To make your habits even more attractive, you can take this strategy one step further.

   Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior and you already have something in common with the group.

10. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, The best is the enemy of the good.

    It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change : the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for side hustle.

    This is the difference between being in motion and taking action.

    The two ideas sound similar, but they are not the same.

    When you are in motion, you are planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they do not produce a result.

11. One of the most effective ways to reduce friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design.

    See Environment design - Impact on Focus and Habits

12. The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.

    1. The French economist Frederick Bastait explained the problem clearly when he wrote,

       ‘It almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa.. Often, the sweeter the first fruit of a habit, the more bitter are its later fruits.’

13. As a general rule,

    The more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.

14. The last mile is always the least crowded.

    Our preference for instant gratification reveals an important truth about success : because of how we are wired, most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfaction;

    The road less travelled is the road of delayed gratification. If you are willing to wait for the rewards, you will face less competition and often get a bigger payoff.

15. What is the difference between the best athletes and everyone else? What do the really successful people do that most do not?

    1. The factors you might expect : genetics, luck, talent.

       At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training everyday, doing the same lifts over and over and over.

16. Habits create the foundation for mastery.

    1. In chess, it is only after the basic movements of pieces have become automatic that a player can focus on the next level of the game.
    2. Each chunk of information that is memorized opens up the mental space for more effortful thinking.
    3. This is true for any endeavor.
    4. When you know the simple movements so well that you can perform them without thinking, you are free to pay attention to more advanced details.

    Habits are the backbone of any pursuit of excellence.

17. The holy grail of habit change is not a single one percent improvement, but a thousand of them. It is a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.

    There is an ancient Greek parable known as the Sorites Paradox, which talks about the effect one small action can have when repeated enough times. One formulation of the paradox goes as follow : Can one coin make a person rich? If you give a person a pile of ten coins, you would not claim that he or she is rich. But if you add another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that no one can be rich unless one coin can make him or her so.

    1. We can say the same about atomic habits. Can one tiny change transform your life? It is unlikely you would say so. But what if you made another? And another? And another? At some point, you will have to admit that your life was transformed by one small change.

18. The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.

    It is remarkable what you can build if you just do not stop. It is remarkable the business you can build if you do not stop working. It is remarkable the body you can build if you do not stop training. It is remarkable the knowledge you can build if you do not stop learning. It is remarkable the fortune you can build if you do not stop saving. It is remarkable the friendships you can build if you do not stop caring.

    Small habits do not add up. They compound.

19. Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

    1. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.

    2. Avoid being ‘fair-weather meditators’. Similarly, you do not want to be a fair-weather athlete or fair-weather writer or a fair-weather anything.

       When a habit is truly important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood.

       Professionals take action even when the mood is not right. They might not enjoy it, but they find a way to put the reps in.

    3. The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.