James Clear.  Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build

Good Habits and Break Bad Habits (2018)

In a paragraph

Building good habits gives a system to achieve your goals and your chosen identity.  Make the habits you want obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

Key points

• You are your habits.Every action you take is a vote for the person you want to be. Choose your identity and then build your habits to fulfil this. Choose who before what or how.  Don’t just write an article, change your identity to become a writer.

• Start to move towards your chosen identity by building habits with small actions that evidence your identity. Action not motion counts and repetition creates learning. Small changes in habits are powerful as they compound and give big long-term returns. 

• The person you build through your good habits gives you the system to achieve your goals.

• Habits arise from a four-stage loop of cue, craving, response and reward.Address these four stages by making the habits you want obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying and the habits you don’t want invisible, unattractive, difficult and unsatisfying.

• Create your environment to promote good habits, to be the architect not the victim of your environment. Behaviour is a function of the person in the environment.Rather than wishing you were a more disciplined person, create a more disciplined environment.

• Habits are behaviours that have been repeated enough to become automatic.They arise as reliable solutions to problems in the environment and are essential to avoid the bottleneck of the conscious mind.  But because they are automatic, they can be dangerous.

• The modern world requires delayed gratification, but we evolved for instant gratification.The payoff for bad habits is now, for good habits in the future.  Good habits serve your dreams of your successful future self against the present you who wants to be full, pampered and entertained.

• Track your habits to give motivation.Act for two minutes to get started.  Concentrate on decisive moments.  Record an implementation intention. Stack habits onto existing habits.  Create commitment devices and work with an accountability partner.

• Pick an identity and habits for your comparative strengths.Concentrate on the goldilocks zone of just manageable difficulty.  Commit as a professional and manage boredom.  Achieve mastery by reflecting and reviewing and by expanding your identity.

Comments

I liked this book for its deep thinking about the potential of habits, and for its clear presentation, full of epigrams.

I found particularly interesting the model of decision-making as involving  a four-stage loop of cue, craving, response and reward and that good habits can be promoted by making them obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

I also found James Clear’s website interesting, and I enjoy his weekly 3-2-1 Newsletter, which provides further epigrams about habits and self improvement.  James Clear includes on his website his notes on some books he has read, and I have copied his format for my book notes.

Media

James Clear website.   

James Clear on Sam Harris Making Sense podcast. 

NOTES

Introduction: My Story

The quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.

The Fundamentals: Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference

1: The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits

A hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed. Plateau of Latent Potential. Goals are about the results you want to achieve, systems are about the processes that lead to those results. Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. You mentally box yourself into a narrow version of happiness. You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

2: How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)

You may want better health, but if you continue to prioritize comfort over accomplishment, you’ll be drawn to relaxing rather than training.

It is 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. The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it.

Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.

The real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity. When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person.

The word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Your identity is literally your “repeated beingness.” I didn’t start out as a writer. I became one through my habits.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. Each time you write a page , you are a writer. Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it’s a vote for that identity. The good news is that you don’t need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides.

New identities require new evidence. It is a simple two-step process: Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins. Identity-based habits. The first step is not what or how, but who.  Your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be.  You become your habits.

3: How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps

A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment. As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases. Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain.  It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.

Our prehistoric ancestors were paying attention to cues that signaled the location of primary rewards like food, water, and sex. Secondary rewards like money and fame.  We chase rewards because they serve two purposes: ( 1 ) they satisfy us and ( 2 ) they teach us.

If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit. Eliminate the cue and your habit will never start. Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act. Make the behavior difficult and you won’t be able to do it. And if the reward fails to satisfy your desire, then you’ll have no reason to do it again in the future.

We can split these four steps into two phases: the problem phase and the solution phase.

The 1st law (Cue) Make it obvious. The 2nd law (Craving) Make it attractive. The 3rd law (Response) Make it easy. The 4th law (Reward) Make it satisfying.

Inversion of the 1st law (Cue) Make it invisible. Inversion of the 2nd law (Craving) Make it unattractive. Inversion of the 3rd law (Response) Make it difficult. Inversion of the 4th law (Reward) Make it unsatisfying.

The 1st Law: Make It Obvious

4: The Man Who Didn’t Look Right

You can notice an opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it. This is what makes habits useful. It’s also what makes them dangerous.

Categorize your habits by how they will benefit you in the long run. Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?

5: The Best Way to Start a New Habit

Implementation intention. Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. Habit stacking: after [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]. Make it obvious.

6: Motivation is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More

Behavior is a function of the Person in their Environment, or B = f(P, E). Many of the actions we take each day are shaped not by purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.  Visual cues are the greatest catalyst of our behavior. Small change in what you see can lead to a big shift in what you do.

How important it is to live and work in environments that are filled with productive cues and devoid of unproductive ones. You don’t have to be the victim of your environment, you can also be the architect of it. Your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context. Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationship to them.

You can train yourself to link a particular habit with a particular context. One space, one use.

When you can use your phone to do nearly anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task – it’s a mishmash of cues. Habits thrive under predictable circumstances.

7: The Secret to Self-Control

Addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment.

Challenge the conventional association of unhealthy behavior as a moral weakness. 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.  Not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

Watching television makes you feel sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the energy to do anything else. You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it.  In the long-run, we become a product of the environment that we live in.  I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.  If you’re playing too many video games, unplug the console and put it in a closet. Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible.

Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.  Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.  Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive

8: How to Make a Habit Irresistible

The modern food industry relies on stretching our Paleolithic instincts beyond their evolutionary purpose. With natural, unprocessed foods, you tend to experience the same sensations over and over.  Bliss point for each product.  We’ve gotten too good at pushing our own buttons.  The supernormal stimuli of our modern world – they exaggerate features that are naturally attractive to us, and our instincts go wild as a result. The opportunities of the future will be more attractive than those of today. Junk food is a more concentrated form of calories than natural foods. Video games are a more concentrated form of play than board games.

Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.  Whenever dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act.  It is the anticipation of a reward — not the fulfillment of it — that gets us to take action. First, the cue is identified and dopamine rises as a craving builds.  Next, a response is taken but the reward does not come as quickly as expected and dopamine begins to drop. Finally, when the reward comes a little later than you had hoped, dopamine spikes again.

Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.

The wanting centers in the brain are large: the brain stem, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental area, the dorsal striatum, the amygdala, and portions of the prefrontal cortex. The liking centers of the brain are much smaller. They are often referred to as hedonic hot spots  and are distributed like tiny islands throughout the brain.  Temptation bundling.

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

We soak up the qualities and practices of those around us.  Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Your culture sets your expectation for what is normal.  You’ll rise together.  Belonging to the tribe . It transforms a personal quest into a shared one. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.

Nearly 75 percent of the subjects had agreed with the group answer even though it was obviously incorrect.  What is everyone else doing?  Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.  The human mind knows how to get along with others. It wants to get along with others. This is our natural mode. You can override it — but it takes work. Imitating the Powerful.

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

Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking. You are losing nothing and you are making marvelous positive gains not only in health, energy and money but also in confidence, self-respect, freedom and, most important of all, in the length and quality of your future life.

Latches onto the underlying motives of human nature. Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. You have been sensing the cues the entire time, but it is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action.  A craving is the sense that something is missing. The gap between your current state and your desired state provides a reason to act. Our feelings and emotions tell us whether to hold steady in our current state or to make a change. It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.

You don’t have to, you get to.  Highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks. A cue that he automatically associated with increased focus.  Create a short routine that you perform every time before you do the thing you love. Maybe you take three deep breaths and smile. Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive.

The 3rd Law: Make It Easy

11: Walk Slowly, but Never Backward

Photography students “quantity” group did best.  Voltaire: “The best is the enemy of the good.”

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 motion doesn’t lead to results, why do we do it? Sometimes we do it because we actually need to plan or learn more. But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.  You want to delay failure. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something.

Start with repetition, not perfection. You just need to get your reps in. Long – term potentiation. Hebb’s Law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”  The importance of repetition in establishing habits was recognized long before neuroscientists began poking around. Both common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a form of change.

Automaticity, the nonconscious mind takes over. Learning curves.  Habits form based on frequency, not time. The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning. Focus on taking action, not being in motion.

12: The Law of Least Effort

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.  Make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.  Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose.

Rather than trying to overcome the friction in your life, you reduce it.  Addition by subtraction.  Japanese companies looked for every point of friction in the manufacturing process and eliminated it. Tidying up can feel so good: we are simultaneously moving forward and lightening the cognitive load our environment places on us. Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.  Reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones. I’m just proactively lazy.  It gives you so much time back.

Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy.  A box of greeting cards that are presorted by occasion. Move the television out of the living room and into a closet after each use – you can be sure you’ll only take it out when you really want to watch something. The greater the friction, the less likely the habit. Redesign your life so the actions that matter most are also the actions that are easiest to do. Human behavior follows the Law of Least Effort.

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

Habits are like the entrance ramp to a highway.  If I change clothes, I know the workout will happen. Decisive moments.  A few habitual choices that determine the path you take.

The Two-Minute Rule.  Any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version: a “gateway habit.”  The point is to master the habit of showing up.  A habit must be established before it can be improved.  If you can’t learn the basic skill of showing up, then you have little hope of mastering the finer details. The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. Make it easy to start and the rest will follow.  The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.  Ritualize.

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

Commitment devices are useful because they enable you to take advantage of good intentions before you can fall victim to temptation.  Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.  After I removed the mental candy from my environment , it became much easier to eat the healthy stuff.

The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying

15: The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change

Feelings of pleasure — even minor ones like washing your hands with soap that smells nice and lathers well — are signals that tell the brain: “This feels good, do this again, next time.” Pleasure teaches your brain that a behavior is worth remembering and repeating.  Completes the habit loop.

It is only recently — during the last five hundred years or so — that society has shifted to a predominantly delayed- return environment.  Our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones.  Behavioral economists refer to this tendency as time inconsistency.  A reward that is certain right now is typically worth more than one that is merely possible in the future.

The consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate.  Overeating is harmful in the long run but appetizing in the moment.  The costs of your good habits are in the present, the costs of your bad habits are in the future.  You are no longer making a choice for Future You, who dreams of being fitter or wealthier or happier.  You are choosing for Present You, who wants to be full, pampered, and entertained.

What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.  Because of how we are wired, most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfaction. The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification.  Success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward.

Add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long-run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.  In getting a habit to stick is to feel successful — even if it’s in a small way. The feeling of success is a signal that your habit paid off and that the work was worth the effort. This is why immediate rewards are essential. They keep you excited while the delayed rewards accumulate in the background.

The ending of any experience is vital.  You want the ending of your habit to be satisfying. The best approach is to use reinforcement. Make avoidance visible.  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.  To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful.

16: How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day

Franklin carried a small booklet everywhere he went and used it to track thirteen personal virtues.  Don’t break the chain of creating every day and you will end up with an impressive portfolio. The most effective form of motivation is progress. 

Tracking can become its own form of reward.  It is satisfying to cross an item off your to-do list.  It feels good to watch your results grow — habit tracking provides visual proof that you are casting votes for the type of person you wish to become.

Never miss twice.  Missing once is an accident.  Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

When successful people fail, they rebound quickly.  You don’t realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad (or busy) days.  Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”  Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing.

17: How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything

Increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behavior. Laws and regulations are an example of how government can change our habits by creating a social contract.  The group agrees to act in a certain way, and if you don’t follow along, you’ll be punished.  You can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable.  Accountability partners.

Advanced Tactics: How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great

18: The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)

The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.

Direct your effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills , to align your ambition with your ability.   Choose the habit that best suits you, not the one that is most popular.  A game where the odds are in your favor. Pick the right habit and progress is easy, pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.

In the beginning of a new activity, there should be a period of exploration.  Work on the strategy that seems to deliver the best results about 80 to 90 percent of the time and keep exploring with the remaining 10 to 20 percent.

What feels like fun to me, but work to others?  Flow.  Where do I get greater returns than the average person?  What comes naturally to me?  Great player creates a new game that favors their strengths.  Genes can’t make you successful if you’re not doing the work.  Pick behaviors that align with your personality and skills. Work hard on the things that come easy.

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

Goldilocks Rule: Just manageable difficulty.  The optimal level of arousal as the midpoint between boredom and anxiety.  Task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability.

Handle the boredom of training.  Variable reward.  Stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.  A fair-weather writer.  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. The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.  Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.

20: The Downside of Creating Good Habits

Once a skill has been mastered there is usually a slight decline in performance over time.  Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery.  The trap of complacency.

A system for reflection and review.  Sustaining an effort. Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement.  Without reflection, we can make excuses, create rationalizations, and lie to ourselves.  What went well this year? What didn’t go so well this year? What did I learn? My yearly Integrity Report answers three questions: What are the core values that drive my life and work? How am I living and working with integrity right now? How can I set a higher standard in the future?

The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.  When chosen effectively, an identity can be flexible rather than brittle.  The hard and stiff will be broken, the soft and supple will prevail.

Conclusion: The Secret to Results That Last

Layer small changes on top of one another.

Obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying.

Invisible, unattractive, hard and unsatisfying.

Appendix

Little Lessons from the Four Laws

Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state. Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.  Suffering is the space between craving a change in state and getting it.  Desire is pursued. Pleasure ensues from action. Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Great craving can power great action — even when friction is high. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action.

The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it. With craving, we are dissatisfied but driven. Your actions reveal your true motivations.  Self-control requires you to release a desire rather than satisfy it.