Atomic Habits
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Summary
A practical handbook to not only understand what habits are and how they form, but how to make them stick in your own life. It also guides you in breaking old habits you want to get rid of. In comparison to other books on habit formation, this is packed with an abundance real word advice and recommendations on how to build the habits that can help you achieve the most in life. It goes beyond describing just the mechanics of habits and delves into the psychology of why habits are formed in the first place and then takes full advantage of that time-and-effort-saving feature of habits to build yourself into the person you want to become.
Key Points
Identity vs. Outcome Change
Goals are important, but the systems of habits and actions are actually what get you there. You must first start out with identity change—deciding who you want to become—before you can sustainably achieve outcome changes—the things you do.
The Habit Loop and the Four Laws of Habit Formation
There are four steps in the habit loop. Cue, craving, response, and reward. Clear takes those four steps and turns them into the four laws of habit formation that can be leveraged to create good habits, or inverted to destroy bad ones. The four laws are
Make it obvious
Make it attractive
Make it easy
Make it satisfying
The inversion of these laws help to break established, and presumably bad, habits
Make it invisible
Make it unattractive
Make it difficult
Make it unsatisfying
Environment Design
Environment design is a powerful way to impact your own actions and therefore, your habit creation. If you want to read a book every night, place one on your pillow when you make your bed in the morning. If you want to exercise in the morning, get your workout clothes out the night before and place them somewhere you have to move them before you can get on with your day. An extension of environment design is the people we surround ourselves with. If we want to become a healthy eater, sit with people at lunch who always eat a salad. The behavior you want to exhibit will be reinforced by the people you spend time with.
Pairing actions you want to do with the habits you need to do can help them become more rewarding, and subsequently more attractive to you. Save an addicting TV show for only when you are running on the treadmill and you will find yourself running a lot more.
Habit Formation
Habit formation is more about repetition than time. You should be less concerned with the number of days you have worked on a habit, and more concerned with the number of times you have successfully completed that habit. It may be that the habit you want to form only happens on Sundays. If so, that habit will take more time to form than habits that are repeated three times every day.
The Two Minute Rule
Boil down the habit you want to form into a two minute action. Two minutes of writing, reading, working out, studying, etc. Whatever it is you want to do, find out the smallest version of that task that can fit into two minutes and aim to do that. Usually, if you do the two minute version of your habit, you’ll end up doing more. The activation energy associated with the task may be high, but once you’ve started, it’s easy to keep going. Don’t feel bad if you only do two minutes worth of your habit. You’ve done it! You’ve just proved to yourself another time that you are becoming the type of person that does [insert your habit here].
Habit Tracking
Habit tracking is a way to hit three of the four laws of habit formation at once. You can make your habits more obvious, more attractive, and more satisfying when you track them. You can make ticks on a paper or calendar, or you can do something physical like dropping paper clips in a jar. This process highlights to yourself the progress you are making and gives you that hit of dopamine that reinforces the action. Habit tracking can be hard so manual tracking should be reserved for your most important habits.
Accountability
You can make yourself accountable to your own goals by looping in a friend, a spouse, or family members to your plans. Tell them what it is you want to become and what you want to accomplish and all the sudden your plans are real. They can ask you about your progress and you know you’ll have to answer them. This is powerfully motivating. You can take this to the next step and make a contract with your new accountability partners. Write down what the consequences will be if you don’t hold to you plans. When something real is at stake, you’re much more likely to follow through.
Great Quotes
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
“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.”
“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”
“Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”