Atomic Habits by James Clear

Rating: 10/10

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Five Sentence Summary

We are what we repeatedly do. Our identity is derived from our constantly repeated systems, which are made up at the atomic level by our habits. The process of behavior change can be broken down into identifying and optimizing the cues that trigger our behavior, understand the biological or social drivers of this behavior, simplify the behavior so that it can be done with little friction or effort, and make the completion of the behavior intrinsically satisfying so as to be repeated. It is through constant evaluation, reflection, and upgrading our behavioral systems in each area of our lives that lead to long-term success.

One Page Summary

Habits are the basic building blocks of our behavioral systems. From our constantly repeated behavior systems our personal identity is born. In the simplest sense, we are what we repeatedly do.
Thus, to engineer lasting change, we can cast small votes toward a certain identity through systems of small, repeatable actions. To change your identity, you change your habits.
A habit can be broken down into discrete events that turns into a self-reinforcing loop that drives our constant behavior. These steps are Cue → Craving → Response → Reward.
To create good habits (The Four Laws of Behavior Change)
- (Cue) Make it obvious
- (Craving) Make it attractive
- (Response) Make it easy
- (Reward) Make it satisfying
To break a bad habit
- (Cue) Make it invisible
- (Craving) Make it unattractive
- (Response) Make it difficult
- (Reward) Make it unsatisfying
The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious. To perform better habits, we must make the cues of our good habits obvious and the cues of our bad habits invisible. The process starts with generating awareness of your current habits. Then, to form new habits, you must identify when and where your will perform them. To break your bad habits, you must identify their cues and remove them from your environment.
The 2nd Law of Behavior change is to make it attractive. Put simply, we are more likely to perform habits where we can see immediate reward. Many of our worst habits are caused by the exploitation of this fact by major corporations, tricking our dopamine-seeking primal brain into finding a certain action irresistible. The key to forming new habits is framing them in an attractive way, i.e. "I get to go to the gym and become healthier" as opposed to "I have to go to the gym."
The 3rd Law of Behavior change is to make it easy. When starting a new habit, it should be able to be completed in two minutes or less. We should similarly prime our environment so that our habits are as easy as possible and are met with minimal friction. Keeping our habits simple also allows us to spend more time taking action and less time in motion, i.e. planning our habits. To break our bad habits, we need to make as difficult as possible to perform.
The 4th Law of Behavior change is to make it satisfying. Habits should give you a sense of accomplishment when you complete them. We find that what is immediately rewarded gets repeated, and what is immediately punished is avoided. This double-edged sword is often the cause of our bad habits, but can be exploited to work in our favor by making the smallest habits rewarding. One way to make completion of your habits satisfying is through tracking them on a daily basis — but keep in mind that our goal is still identity change, and not the short-term feeling produced by crossing your habits off a list.
While habits are the basic building blocks of our system, our systems need to be continually upgraded to achieve sustained success. We can up our chances for success by first identifying our strengths from a genetic perspective, then seek to apply our efforts in somewhere that magnifies our strengths. This is a simple relationship, but is often overlooked.
Once we have placed ourselves in a new system, we must strike the balance of exploration and exploitation. But the path to long term success is strikingly mundane, and the most successful people fall in love with the monotony, the process, the repetitive.
Mastery = Habits + Deliberate practice. Often times when we are deep in a routine, we let some things slip. It is thus prudent to have a process in which your review your systems, identify where they can be advanced, and then upgrade them. Our habits should be made more and more efficient and have a larger and larger impact as we move up the ladder.

Notable Quotes

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" — Carl Jung
"Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them"
"Genes can predispose, but they don't predetermine" — Gabor Mate

1. The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.
Plateau of Latent Potential — the time after starting a habit in which you've done the habit a decent amount of time but have yet to see the payoff. Think how x^2 is less than x for x ≤ 1
Atomic habits are single cogs in our personal systems. Build this interconnected network of habits in such a way that whatever you seek is inevitable if you simply follow the system.

2. How Your Habits Shape Your Identity

Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last, unless the behavior is paired with other behaviors that done enough times cause you to identify with them.
The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader. These identify-based systems are the basis of habit and behavior change.
Therefore, understand that every action you take is a vote for the type of person you want to become, and act accordingly.

3. How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

Cue → Craving → Response → Reward → reward associated with that cue, and the habit loop repeats. These can be split up into cue+craving = problem phase, response+reward=solution phase
To create good habits
- (Cue) Make it obvious
- (Craving) Make it attractive
- (Response) Make it easy
- (Reward) Make it satisfying
To break a bad habit
- (Cue) Make it invisible
- (Craving) Make it unattractive
- (Response) Make it difficult
- (Reward) Make it unsatisfying

The 1st Law — Make it Obvious

4. The Man Who Didn't Look Right

The greatest challenge in changing habits is generating and maintaining a perpetual awareness of your subconscious actions.
To generate this awareness, note down the individual actions you do during your various daily processes, noting each of them as +, -, or = based on whether or not they get you closer to the person you want to be. This is the first step in generating the awareness necessary for behavior change.

5. The Best Ways to Start a New Habit

The 1st Law of Behavior Change is make it obvious.
The two most common habit cues are time and location
Our habit process is not Markovian and therefore what we do now greatly affects what we do next — we can exploit this by stacking our habits together in a chain
Implementation intention — "I will [BEHAVIOR] at/when [TIME/EVENT] in [LOCATION]"
Implementation via habit stacking — "After [BEHAVIOR] I will then [BEHAVIOR]"

6. Motivation is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

Make the cues of your habit more obvious. The cue is the "everytime" part of the habit implementation method
Assemble your environment and define your cues to be most conducive to your habits. For example, leaving a book open to where you left off to cue your reading habit.
"It is the easiest time to build habits when you are moving to a new environment, as you have no association to that canvas" → acknowledge this and carefully choose the cues for your various habits.

7. The Secret to Self-Control

The inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change is make it invisible
The biggest difference between a disciplined and undisciplined person is a disciplined person has primed their environment in a way that is more conducive to behaving in the way the way they intended.
Bad habits are hard to overwrite once they are ingrained; environments that kill the cue of that habit at the source are easy to change.

The 2nd Law — Make it Attractive

8. How to Make a Habit Irresistible

The 2nd Law of Behavior Change is make it attractive.
Major industries have exploited this habit-formation technique for years. For example, processed foods overload our primal brain with pleasure that makes us continue eating again and again.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. Every addictive habit — junk food, gambling, social media, is associated with higher dopamine levels. Dopamine is released not only when experience pleasure, but when you anticipate it. Thus, it is the anticipation of the reward, not the reward itself, that drives our behaviors.
That relationship explains why good habits are hard and bad habits are easy. Bad habits are affective at spiking dopamine in the short term, and thus drive this anticipation. The key to good habits then lies in anticipating the long-term reward every time you perform the desired behavior.
Temptation bundling → you are more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time
Implementation intention (habit stacking + temptation bundling.
- 1. After [Current habit], I will [Habit I need].
- 1. After [Habit I need], I will [Habit I want]

9. The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits

We most often find our habits that are the social norms of our environment. In this setting, we imitate those that are close, the many, and the powerful.
To leverage the first one, join a culture where your desired behavior is the norm. (Surrounded by fit people, by hard workers, early risers, etc)
When a new habit is different from the many, it can be unattractive. When it is similar to the many, it is very attractive.
If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive

10. How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits

The inversion of the 2nd law of behavior change is make it unattractive.
Many of our habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires such as reducing uncertainty or belonging. Whenever a habit addresses this motive, we develop a craving to do it again. Done enough times, we associate this reward and habit and bad habits are formed.
The key to fixing bad habits come in changing your frame of reference to highlight the benefits of your habits rather than their drawbacks reprograms your mind and makes your habits more attractive. An example is framing exercise as "I get an opportunity to make myself healthier" rather than "I have to go to the gym"

The 3rd Law — Make it Easy

11. Walk Slowly, But Never Backward

The 3rd Law of Behavior Change is Make it Easy
Being in motion versus taking action is planning to go for a run or planning your exercise routine but not executing on it. We often set things in motion because it makes us feel like we are getting things done. Look to take action more than you are in motion.
When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something — you need to take action.
It’s not how long we have been practicing a habit, but how many times we have done it. It’s a discrete reps-based amount, not a continuous time.
The habit curve is logarithmic, you usually need to do it a large amount of times, but you get decently close decently quickly.

12. The Law of Least Effort

Habits are just obstacles to getting what we really want — what we really want is the outcome the habit delivers
Therefore, we need our habits to be as easy and completable as possible, a low hurdle if you will
Optimize your environment with “lean production” principles. Instead of adding things, look to ruthlessly eliminate things and cues that provoke your negative habits.
Prime your environment for future use — to consistently perform your routines, the environment in which you perform should look the same every time.

13. How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule

Decisive moments are the node at which your outcome has the greatest shift in conditional probability density — P(Good day | make this choice) >> P(bad day | make this choice) → identify where in your day these entropy-minimization nodes are
When you start a new habit, make it take less than two minutes to do. That way, even when you really really don’t want to, you do it anyway.
The small habits are still votes cast to your new identity, and the votes count just as much as any other habit.

14. How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible

Inversion of the 3rd Law — make it difficult
Commitment devices are choices you make in the present that control and shape your actions in the future.
The key is to change the task such that is requires more work to get out of the good habit than to get started on it
Many one-time choices can cut habits off at the source or make it very hard to keep up your bad habits

The 4th Law — Make it Satisfying

15. The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change

The 4th Law of Behavior Change is make it satisfying
The first three laws of behavior change make a habit more likely to be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change makes habits more likely to be completed the next time.
The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change is what gets immediately rewarded gets repeated, what is immediately punished gets avoided.
The cost of our good habits is in the present and their reward in the future; the cost of our bad habits is in the future but their reward is in the present. Prime your way of thinking to greater value long-term rewards at the expense of short term discomfort.
When below the Plateau of Latent Potential, you can incentivize yourself to continue your habits with small positive reinforcement until your change of state itself becomes rewarding enough.

16. How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

Habit tracking is a good way to combine all of the laws of behavior change into a convenient format that keeps you honest and motivates you to continue your habits.
When your habit streak inevitably breaks down, its important to never miss twice. One day of breaking your habits is a missed day. Two days is the start of a new habit.
Be careful in what exactly you are tracking — be sure that you are not tracking the wrong thing. What you track should be indicative that your system is working, not on superficial or distracting metrics.

17. How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

The inverse of the 4th Law of Behavior Change is make is unsatisfying
There are many ways to make doing your bad habits unsatisfying — one common one is any kind of public display of commitment or personal contracts with your peers

Advanced Tactics — How to Go from Being Good to Truly Great

18. The Truth About Talent

The secret to maximizing your odds of success is first identify your strengths, then align yourself in a position where your strengths are considered strengths in that industry
Your personality, commonly defined on your openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, greatly define which habits we find tolerable and which we find intolerable.
To find a game where the odds are in your favor, you must explore different opportunities until you begin to make progress, then you exploit this opportunity.
Some questions to ask when finding your strengths → great pairing with Peter Drucker's questions from Managing Oneself
1. What feels like fun to me but work to others?
2. What makes me lose track of time?
3. Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
4. What comes naturally to me?

19. The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans are most motivated when doing tasks that lie right on the edge of their current abilities — not too hard, but not too easy.
Long-term success via repetition of habits can get quite mundane. The greatest threat to our continued success is not failure but boredom. The most successful people fall in love with the process, embraces the monotony, and continue to churn.

20. The Downside of Creating Good Habits

The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors.
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, internalizing it, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development.
The way to make sure you are advancing your habits in each area is through periodic (roughly monthly) reviews of your current systems.