Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   James Clear

Genre:    Nonfiction, Self-Improvement, Psychology

319 pages, published  October 17, 2018

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Atomic Habits, author James Clear provides readers with solid, well researched advice on how to better adopt healthy habits and rid yourself of bad ones.  He advocates adopting systems rather than relying on willpower.

Quotes 

“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 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.”

 

“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. If you’re proud of how your hair looks, you’ll develop all sorts of habits to care for and maintain it. If you’re proud of the size of your biceps, you’ll make sure you never skip an upper-body workout. If you’re proud of the scarves you knit, you’ll be more likely to spend hours knitting each week. Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.”

 

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

 

“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

 

“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.”

 

“Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”

 

“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.”

 

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.”

 

“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”

 

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

 

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

 

 “The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”

 

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

 

“When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.”

 

“Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.”

 

“Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”

 

“We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: The close. The many. The powerful.”

 

“If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.”

 

 “You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”

 

 “The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.”

 

“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 a side hustle. 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.”

 

“When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “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.”

 

“In fact, the tendency for one purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption”

 

“True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.”

 

“With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.”

 

 “Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them into action.”

 

“Over the long run, however, the real reason you fail to stick with habits is that your self-image gets in the way. This is why you can’t get too attached to one version of your identity. Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.”

 

“Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.”

 

“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. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.”

 

“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. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.”

 

“Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. This pattern shows up everywhere. Cancer spends 80 percent of its life undetectable, then takes over the body in months. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks. Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes”

 

“This is why remaining part of a group after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.”

 

“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.”

 

“Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.”

 

“Emotions drive behavior. Every decision is an emotional decision at some level. Whatever your logical reasons are for taking action, you only feel compelled to act on them because of emotion. In fact, people with damage to emotional centers of the brain can list many reasons for taking action but still will not act because they do not have emotions to drive them. This is why craving comes before response. The feeling comes first, and then the behavior.”

 

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.”

 

“Happiness is simply the absence of desire.- When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure, but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.

As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between on desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.”

 

“Becoming the type of person you want to become — someone who lives by a stronger standard, someone who believes in themselves, someone who can be counted on by the people that matter to them — is about the daily process you follow and not the ultimate product you achieve.”

 

“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. I think this principle is so important that I’ll stick to it even if I can’t do a habit as well or as completely as I would like. Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.”

 

“You do it because it’s who you are and it feels good to be you. 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.”

 

“Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run.”

 

“We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.”

My Take

Like The Happiness Project, Atomic Habits is a transformative book, full of extremely useful, actionable advice.  Author James Clear makes a compelling case that adopting positive systems and habits can transform our lives.  I especially appreciated his exploration of the role that identity plays in whether or not we succeed in positive habit formation.  For example, if you are trying to quit smoking instead of saying “No thanks, I’m trying to quit” when offered a cigarette, you should say “No thanks, I’m not a smoker.” The more you say, “I’m the type of person who _________,” the more you identify as that type of person and the more likely that you will be that type of person.  Well worth a read.