Book Notes: Atomic Habits

Its so easy to overestimate the importance of one defining moment and underestimate the value of making small improvements on a daily basis. Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Wheather it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth shattering improvement that everyone will talk about. Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn't particularly notable- sometimes it isn't even noticeable- but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. Here's how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you'll end up thiry-seven times better by the time you're done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you will decline nearly down to zero. Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and cost of bad ones become strikingly apparent. If you go to the gym three days in a row, you're still out of shape. If you study Mandarin for an hour tonight, you still haven't learned the language. We make a few changes, but the results never seem to come quickly and so we slide back into our previous routines. The slow place of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide. If you eat an unhealthy meal today, the scale doesn't move mouch. If you work late tonight and ignore your family, they will forgive you. If you procrastinate and put your work of, you can still finish it later. But when we repeat these errors day after day, but replicating poor decisions, our small choices compound into toxic results.

It doesn't matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path towards success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.

• Productivity compounds

• Knowledge compounds

• Relationships compound

• Stress compound

• Negative thoughts compound

• Outrage compounds

Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we ant in life is to set specific actionable goals. What's the difference between system and goals? Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

• If you are an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million-dollar business. Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.

Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? Yes, the only way to actually win is to get better each day. The score takes care of itself. Goals are good for setting direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.

Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.

Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.

Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness.

Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress.

If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. This is the meaning of phrase atomic habits- a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.

• The first layer is changing your outcomes. This level is concerned with changing your results: losing weight, publishing a book, winning a championship.

• The second layer is changing your process. This level is concerned with changing your habits and systems: implementing a new routine at the gym, decluttering your desk for a better workflow, developing a meditation practice.

• The third and deepest layer is changing your identity. This level is concerned with changing your beliefs: your worldview, your self-image, your judgements about yourself and others. Most of beliefs, assumptions and biases you hold are associated with this level.

Imagine two people resisting cigarettes

Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs. The system of a democracy is founded on beliefs like freedom, majority rule, and social equality. The system of a dictatorship has a very different set of beliefs like absolute authority and strict obidience. A similar pattern exists whether we are discussing individuals, organizations or societies. There are a set of beliefs and assumptions that shape the system, an identity behind the habits. Behaviour that is incongruent with the self will not last. You may want more money, but if your identity is someone who consumes rather than creates, then you will continue to be pulled toward spending rather than earning. 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. True behaviour change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you will stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.

• The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.

• The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.

• The goal is not to learn a instrument, the goal is to become a musician.

Your habits are how you embody your identity. When you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organized person. Whatever your identity is right now, you only believe it because you have proof of it. If you go to church every Sunday for twenty years, you have evidence that you are religious. Of course, your habits are not the only action that influence your identitym but by virtue of their frequency they are usually the most important ones.

This is a gradual evolution. We do not change by snapping our fingers and deciding to be someone entirely new. We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do. It is a simple two-step process:

1. Decide the type of person you want to be.

2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

The first step is now what or how, but who. You need to know who you want to be. You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself. Your identity is not set in stone.

A habit is a behaviour that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.

The process of building habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward. Breaking it down into these fundamental parts can help us understand what a habit is, how it works, and how to improve it. This four-step pattern is the backbone of every habit, and your brain runs through these steps in the same order each time.

If a behaviour is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit.

This four-step process is not something that happens occasionally, but rather it is an endless feedback loop that is running and active during every moment you are alive- even now. We can split these four steps into two phases: the problem phase and the solution phase. The problem phase includes the cue and the craving, and it is when you realise that something needs to change. The solution phase includes the response and the reward, and it is when you take action and achieve the change you desire. All behaviour is driven by the desire to solve a problem. Sometimes the problem is that you notice something good and you want to obtain it. Sometimes problem is that you are experiencing pain and you want to relive it.

1. Make it obvious.

2. Make it attractive.

3. Make it easy.

4. Make it satisfying.

1. Make it invisible.

2. Make it unattractive.

3. Make it difficult.

4. Make it unsatisfying.

No behaviour happens in isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behaviour. Why is this important? When it comes to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behaviour to your advantage. One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do everyday and then stack your new behaviour on top. This is called habit stacking.

For example:

• Meditation. After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will meditate for one minute.

• Exercise. After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately change into my workout clothes.

Your morning routine habit stacking might look like this:

1. After I pour my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for sixty seconds.

2. After I meditate for sixty seconds, I will write my todo list for the day.

3. After I write my todo list for the day, I will immediately begin with the first task.

• If you want to remember to take your medication each night, put your pill bottle directly next to the faucet on the bathroom counter.

• If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand in the middle of the living room.

• If you want to remember to send more thank-you notes, keep a stack of stationary on your desk.

• If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them in common locations around the house.

Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.

For example, many people drink more in social situations than they would ever drink alone. The trigger is rarely a single cue, but rather the whole situation: watching your friends order drinks, hearing the music at the bar, seeing the beers on tap.

• Small changes in context can lead ot large changes in behaviour over time.

• Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues that stand out.

• Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment.

• Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behaviour. The context becomes the cue.

• It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are not fighting against old cues.

Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. Every behavior that is highly habit-forming- taking drugs, eating junk food, playing videogames, browsing social media- is associated with higher levels of dopamine. The same can be said for our most basic habitual behaviours like eating food, drinking water, having sex, and interacting socially. Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it. Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before they place a bet. Whenever your dopamine rises, so does your motivation to act. The reward system that is activated in the brain when you recieve a reward is the same system that is activated when you anticipate a reward. As a child, thinking about Christmas morning can be better than opening the gifts. As an adult, daydreaming about an upcoming vacation can be more enjoyable than actually being on vacation. Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.

Desire is the engine that drives behaviour. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that preceds it. It is the craving that leads to the response. We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place.

You're more likely to find a behavior attracttive if you get to do one of your favourite things at the same time. Perhaps you want to hear about the latest celebrity gossip, but you need to get in shape. Using temptation bundling, you could only read thte tabloids and watch reality shows at the gym.

Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are essential to our survival. We follow the script handed down by our friends and family, our church or school, our local community and society at large. Each of these cultures and groups comes with its own set of expectations and standards- when and whether to get married, how many children to have, which holidays to celebrate, how much money to spend on your child's birthday party. In many ways, these social norms are the invisible rules that guide your behaviour each day. You are always keeping them in mind. We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:

1. The close.

2. The many.

3. The powerful.

We copy the way our parents handle arguments, the way our peers flirt with each other, the way our coworkers get results. When your friends smoke pot, you give it a try too. As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits. If one person in a relationship lost weight, the other partner would also slim down about one third of the time.

One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behaviour is the normal behaviour. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them everyday.

Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It transforms a personal quest into a shared one. Previously you were on your own. Your identity was singular. You are a reader. You are a musician. You are an athelete. When you join a book club or a band or a cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you. Growth and change is no longer a individual pursuit. We are readers. The shared identity begins to reinforce your personal identity.

Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior. We are constantly scanning our environment and wondering, "What is everyone else doing?" We check reviews on Amazon or Yelp or TripAdvisor because we want to imitate the "best" buying, eating and travel habits. It's usually a smart strategy but there can be a downside. The normal behaviour of the trive often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. 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- you can choose to ignore the gorup or to stop caring about what people think- but it takes work.

Humans everywhere pursue power, prestige, and status. We are drawn to behaviour that earn us respect approval, admiration, and status. We want to be the one in the gym who can do muscle-ups or the musician who can play the hardest chord progressions. Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out. This is one reasy we care so much about the habits of highly effective people. High status people enjoy the approval, respect, and praise of others. And that means if a behaviour gets us these, we find it attractive. When our mother comes to visit, we clean up house because we don't want to be judged. We are continually wondering "What will others think of me?" and altering our behaviour based on the answer.

Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive. Some of our underlying motives include:

1. Conserve energy.

2. Obtain food and water.

3. Find love and reproduce.

4. Connect and bond with others.

5. Win social acceptance and approval.

6. Reduce uncertainity.

7. Achieve status and prestige.

A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. Your brain did not evolve with a desire to smoke cigarettes or to check Instagram or to play videogames. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainity and relive anxiety.

You see a cue, categorize it based on past experience, and determine the appropriate responce. Life feels reactive, but its actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you've just seen and what has worked for you in the past. You are endlessly predecting what will happen in the next moment. These predictions lead to feelings, which is how we typically describe a craving- a feeling, a desire, an urge. A craving is the sense that something is missing. It is the desire to change your internal state. When the temperature falls, there is a gap between what your body is currently sensing and what it wants to be sensing. This gap between your current state and you desired state provides a reason to act.

You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience. Sometimes all you need is a slight mindset shift. For instance you think you have to wake up early for work. Now imagine changing just one word: You don't 'have' to. You 'get' to. By simply changing one word, you shift the way you view each event. You transition from seeing these behaviours as burdens and turn them into opportunties.

Habit formation is the process by which a behaviour becomes progressively more automatic through repetition. The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient in that activity. Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. This means that simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit. You should be asking how many repetitions are required to make a habit automatic? There is nothing magical about time passing with regard to habit formation. What matters is the rate at which you perform the behaviour. It is the frequency that makes the difference. To build a habit, you need to practice it. And the most effective way to make practice happen is to adhere to the 3rd Law of Behaviour Change: make it easy.

Imagine you are holding a garden hose that is bent in the middle. Some water can flow through but not very much. If you want to increase the rate at which water passes through the hose, you have two options. The first option is to crank up the valve, the second option is to simply remove the bend and let the water flow through naturally. Trying to pump up your motivaition to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life. Meanwhile making your habits simple and easy is like removing the bend. Rather than trying to overcome friction in your life, try to reduce it. If you look at the most habit-forming products, you'll notice that one of the things these goods and services do best is remove little bits of friction from your life. Meal delivery services reduce the friction of shopping groceries. Dating apps reduce the friction of making social introductions. The central idea is to create environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible.

Whenever you orgainize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy.

• Want to draw more? Put pencils, pens, notebooks, and drawing tools on top of your desk, within easy reach.

• Want to exercise? Set out your workout clothes, shoes, gym bag, and water bottle ahead of time.

• Want to improve diet? Chop up a ton of fruits and vegetables on weekends and pack them in containers, you have easy access to them.

You can calso invert this princile and prime the environment to make bad behaviours difficult. The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.

The rule states, "When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do." You can scale any habit down to 2 minute version.

• "Read before bed at night" becomes "Read one page."

• "Do thirty minutes of yoga" becomes "Take out my yoga mat."

• "Study for class" becomes "Open my notes."

• "Fold the laundry" becomes "Fold one pair of socks."

The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. A new habit should not feel like a challenge. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. People often think it's weird to get hyped about reading one page or meditating for one minute. But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. By doing the same warmup before every workout, you make it easier to get into a state of peek performance. By developing a consistent power-down habit, you make it easier to get to bed at a reasonable time each night. Once you have established this habit, you can move on to improve it further.

The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase friction until you don't even have the option to act.

• Buy a water filter to clean your drinking water.

• Use smaller plates to reduce caloric intake.

• Buy a good mattress to improve sleep.

• Get blackout curtains.

• Unsub from emails, turn off notifications, delete games and social media.

• Social media browsing can be cut off with a website blocker.

Our ancestors spent their days responding to grave threats, securing the next meal, and taking shelter from the storm. It made sense to place a high value on instant gratification. The distant future was less of a concern. And after thousands of generations in an immediate-return environment, our brains evolved to prefer quick payoffs to long-term ones. You value the present more than the future. Usually, this tendancy serves us well. A reward that is certain right now is typically worth more than one that is merely possible in the future. But occasionaly, our bias toward instant gratification causes problems.

In a perfect world, the reward for a good habit is the habit itself. In the real world, good habits tend to feel worthwhile only after they have provided you with something. The ending of any experience is vital because we tend to remember it more than other phases. You want ending of your habit to be satisfying. The best approach is to use reinforcement, which refers to the process of using an immediate reward to increase the rate of behavior. Reinforcement ties your habit to an immediate reward, which makes it satisfying when you finish. It can be helpful when dealing with habits of aviodance, which are behaviors you want to stop doing. It can be challenging to stick with habits like "no frivolous purchases" because nothing happens when you don't buy that pair of shoes. It can be hard to feel satisfied when there is no action in the first place. All you are doing is resisting temptation, and there isn't much satisfying about that.

A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether you did a habit. The most basic format is to get calender and cross off each day you stick with your routine.

• Benefit #1: Habit tracking is obvious

• Benefit #2: Habit tracking is attractive

• Benefit #3: Habit tracking is satisfying

No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Before long, an emergency will pop up- you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time. Whenever this happens, try to remind yourself of a simple rule: never miss twice. If I miss one day, I try to get back into it as quickly as possible. Missing one workout happens, but I'm not going to miss two in a row. The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. This is a distinguishing feature between winners and losers. Anyone can have a bad performance, a bad workout, or a bad day at work. But when successful people fail, they rebound quickly. The breaking of a habit doesn't matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. Furthermore, it's not always about what happens during the workout. It's about being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. It's easy to train when you feel good, but it's crucial to show up when you don't feel like it- even if you do less than you hope. Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reattirms your identity.

The dark side of tracking a particular habit is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it. The human mind wants to "win" whatever game is being played. This pitfall is evident in many areas of life. We focus on working long hours instead of getting meaningful work done. We care more about getting ten thousand steps than we do about getting healthy. When we choose the wrong measurement, we get the wrong behavior. Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system.

Law and regulations are an example of how government can change our habits by creating a social contract. Take example of helmet and seat-belt laws. Just as governments use laws to hold citizens accountable, you can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable. A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don't follow through. Then you find one or two people to act as your accountability partners and sign off on the contract with you.

Your personality is the set of characteristics that is consistent from situation to situation. The most proven scientific analysis of personality is known as the "Big Five", which breaks down to five spectrums of behavior.

1. Openness to experience: from curious and inventive on one and to cautious and consistent on the other.

2. Conscientiousness: organized and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous.

3. Extroversion: outgoing and energetic to solitary and reserved.

4. Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached.

5. Neuroticism: anxious and sensitive to confident, calm and stable.

All five characteristics have biological underpinnings, can be tracked from birth. As an example consider neuroticism, which is a personality trait all people posses to various degrees. People who are high in neuroticism tend to be anxious and worry more than others. This trait has been linked to hypersensitivity of the amygdala, the portion of the brain responsible for noticing threats. In other words, people who are more sensitive to negative cues in their environment are more likely to score high in neuroticism.

How do you pick the right habit? In the long-run, if you continue to advance and improve, any area can become challenging. At some point, you need to make sure you're playing the right game for your skillset. How do you figure that out?

As you explore different options, there are a series of questions you can ask yourself to continually narrow in on the habits and areas that will be satisfying to you:

• What feels like fun to me, but work to others?

• What makes me loose track of time?

• Where do I get greater returns than average person?

• What naturally comes to me?

When you can't win by being better, you can win by being different. Boiling water will soften will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can't control whether you're a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it's bette to be hard or soft.

Biological differences matter. Even so, it's more productive to focus on whether you are fulfilling your own potential than comparing yourself to someone else. The fact that you have a natural limit to any specific ability has nothing to do with whether you are reaching the ceiling of your capacity. People get so caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effor required to get close to them. Furthuremore, genes can't make you successful if your're not doing the work. Yes, it's possible that the ripped trainer at the gym has better genes, but if you haven't put in the same reps, it's impossible to say if you have been dealt a better or worse genetic hand. Until you work as hard as those you admire, don't explain away their success as luck.

Work hard on things that come easy.

At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training everyday, doing the same lifts over and over and over. Really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom. Mastery requires practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes. The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. As soon as we experience the slightest dip in motivation, we begin seeking a new strategy- even if the old one was still working. I can guarentee that if you manage to start a habit and keep sticking to it, there will be days when you feel like quitting. When you start a business, there will be days when you don't feel like showing up. Whne you are at the gym, there will be sets that you don't feel like finishing. When it's time to write there will be days tat you don't feel like typing. But 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.

Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled of course by urgencies in life.

Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible pahts for improvement. Without reflection, we can make excuses, create rationalizations, and like to overselves. Improvements is not just about learning habits, it's about fine-tuning them. Reflection and review ensures that you spend your time on the right things and make course corrections whenever necessary. You don' t want to keep practicing a habit if it becomes ineffective.

Reflections and review offers an ideal time to revisit one of the most important aspects of behaviour change: identity.

The schoolteacher who ignores innovative teaching methods and sticks with her tried-and-true lesson plans. The veteran manager who is commited to doing things "his way". The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it. One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you. If you tie everthing up in being the point guard or the parter at the firm or whatever else, then the loss of that facet of your life will wreck you. If you're a vegan and then develop a health condition that forces you to change your diet, you'll have an identity crisis on your hands. Military veterans and forer entrepreneurs report similar feelings. The key to mitigating these losses of identity is to redefine yourself such that you get to keep important aspects of your identity even if your particular role changes.

Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into previous patterns of thinking and acting- even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.