Atomic habits by James Clear

In one paragraph

Most likely you know exactly what habits are holding you back. Smoking, playing too much video games, spending endless hours on social media. But you just can’t find a way to eliminate them. On the other hand you have habits you start regularly, but just can’t stick to them. Working out, eating healthy, reading books. You restart again and again. But why is this? The good news: You can change all that. You don’t even have to change yourself, most likely it’s the environment you live in. If you’re sick of being stuck and want to influence your life to the better in a very practical way, this book gives you the HOW TO manual.

Notes from the book

These are the notes I took while reading the book. The whole summary can seem a lot. If you just want to take away the most important ideas, just scan my key findings.

Power of atomic habits

My key findings
- Ask yourself: What can I do every single day in order to make sure that I become the person I want to be? To become a champion, establish habits of a champion first.
- There exists nothing like „overnight-success“. Many previous actions lead up to a climax where results of those actions compile and ultimately show. Outcomes are delayed so be patient. It may take a lot of time.
- Forget about goals, focus on systems instead. Be a process-guy and value the process itself more than the end result.
- Establish habits that automate the daily noise to free yourself and have more time for the important tasks.

Habit = behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic and solves everyday problems with as little energy and effort as possible
„Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement“
Longterm success is a product of daily habits – not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.
Be more concerned with your current trajectory than your current results.
- Net-worth -> financial habits
- Weight -> eating habits
- Clutter -> cleaning habits
Habits can work for you or against you.
Plateau of latent potential: Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change + most powerful outcomes are delayed.
Your habits shape your identity. Focus not on what you want to achieve, but who you want to become. Every action you take is a vote for or against the person you wish to become.
Establish habits to make the fundamentals of life easier and save time you can use to do what you want in the future.
What you crave is not the habit itself, but the change in emotional or physical state it delivers.
Four step feedback loop is needed to create a habit
1. Cue
2. Craving
3. Response
4. Reward
Four laws of behavior change
1. Make it obvious (or invisible)
2. Make it attractive (or unattractive)
3. Make it easy (or difficult)
4. Make it satisfying (or unsatisfying)

Law 1: Make it obvious

My key findings
- Stop trying to force yourself to do something through willpower. Instead shape your environment so that the easiest and most efficient behavior is your desired behavior.
- On the other side, shape your environment in a way that makes the triggers that initiate bad behavior invisible to you. No triggers, no bad behavior.
- Be specific about when and where you will be doing something. Commit yourself to it.
- Stack desired behaviors on top of already existing ones and create a habit chain.

Before you can optimize any behavior, start with awareness of what you’re doing.
Three steps to make habits obvious:
1. Make a list of your daily habits
2. Ask yourself: „Does this behavior help me become the person I wish to become?“ „Is this a vote for or against my desired identity?“
3. Pointing and Calling: Every time you do a bad habit, become aware of it by saying out loud what you’re doing and how it will affect you.
  „I am about to eat this cookie and it will hurt my health.“
Best process to start new habit:
1. Implementation intention
  „I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIMES] in [LOCATION].“
2. Habit stacking
  „After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].“
Environment is more important for habit building than motivation. A stable and predictable environment supports stable & predictable habits.
The secret of self-control is to make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
„Disciplined“ people that seem to have more self-control use self-control the least. They avoid temptations instead of resisting them.
Self-control is energy draining and consumes a lot of willpower.
If you can’t seem to get work done, leave your phone in another room for some hours.

Law 2: Make it attractive

My key findings
- Instead of trying to convince your peers to change their behavior to your desired behavior, join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
- Reprogram your relationship with difficult habits by attaching them to positive feelings. Do something you like before and after.

Habits are dopamine-driven feedback loop.
Anticipation of reward – not the fulfillment of it – gets us to take action.
Pair what you want with what you need.
„After I [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].“
The culture we live in and the behavior of our peers determine which behaviors are attractive to us. We have a strong desire to fit in and belong to the tribe.
We imitate 3 social groups:
1. the close: familiy & friends
2. the many: the tribe
3. the powerful: those with status & prestige
Most effective thing to build better habits is to join a culture where
1. your desired behavior is the normal behavior
2. you already have something in common with the group
If behavior can get us approval, respect and praise, we find it attractive.
Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face, they are just methods you learned to use.
Our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
Life often feels reactive, but is actually predictive.
Habits are attractive when associated with positive feeling and unattractive when associated with negative feeling.
Do something you enjoy immediately before you do a difficult habit.
Reframe the associations you have about hard habits and bad habits.
Highlight the benefits of avoiding bad habits to make them attractive.

Law 3: Make it easy

My key findings
- Always start with producing huge amounts of quantity / repetition, then optimize for quality. This is the way nature does it, why do it differently?
- Start a new habit with a time invest that you can not argue against. Then grow gradually from there. It will feel more natural and less as a burden on top of everything else.
- Always show the fuck up and never break the chain. Ever. Just keep pushing.
- Before establishing a habit think of clever one-time decisions that make it unavoidable for you to behave the desired way.

Quantity leads to consistent quality over time!
Example of photography class: one group had to take one picture only, the other had to take thousands and only hand in one. The latter group had by far better results than the former.
We want to delay failure by spending time planning instead of doing.
The key is to start with repetition, not perfection. Preparation can become procrastination.
Practice is the most effective form of learning. Focus on taking action.
Habits form based on frequency, not time.
Law of least effort:
We gravitate naturally towards the option that requires the least amount of work.
Create an environment where doing the right things is as easy as possible.
Reduce friction for good behavior, increase it with bad behavior.
2 minute rule: „When you start a new habit, it should take less than 2 minutes to do.“
Standardize and ritualize the process before you optimize it. You can not improve something, that does not exist.
Show the fuck up!
Break things down to the most simple and easy task possible and grow from there. Marathon -> put on the running shoes.
Grandfather of good friend of mine: You want to reap the olives before planting the olive tree.
Make smart one-time choices that automate your future habits. E.g.: buy a better matress, automate savings plan.

Law 4: Make it satisfying

My key findings
- Track your habit streak so that you can visualize your progress. This will motivate you to keep going.
- Get someone as an accountability partner and commit to execute the desired habit consistently. Define negative consequences that really hurt you, when you fail to stick to your habits.

Cardinal rule of behavior change:
„What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.“
To make a habit stick, you need to immediately feel successful – even in a small way.
Making progress = most satisfying feeling.
Use a habit tracker as a simple way to measure your consistency and your progress.
Don’t break the chain and keep the habit streak alive.
Never miss twice and rebound quickly.
Get yourself an accountability partner. We do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.
Habit contract can add social cost to not sticking to desired behavior.

Advanced concepts & lessons

My key findings
- Instead of trying to win a game you can’t win, look for a game that suits you best and then execute at the highest level possible.
- If you can’t find it, create it. This way you leverage your strengths, avoid your weaknesses and dramatically reduce the level of competition.
- You might not enjoy the practices of this game. What will really separate you from others is your ability to still find a way to show up and put in the work.
- First learn how to do things the right way from the very best. Then work on delivering the exact same results again and again no matter what circumstances.
- Your brain fails badly when imagining exponential growth. Habits compound over time. So even if you can not imagine exactly where you will end up, just keep pushing and never stop. You will be amazed what happens, when you just don’t stop. Reminder: This is valid for good AND bad habits.

„The secret to maximizing your odds for success is to choose the right field of competition.“
Direct effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills to align your ambition with your ability.
Choose the habits that best suit you.
At first try out many possibilities. After this period, shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found. Experiment occasionally.
Four steps to find competition field:
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?
Skill stacking: Combine your skills to reduce the level of competition. „When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.“
„A great player creates a new game that favors his strengths and avoids his weaknesses.“
Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it.
Goldilocks rule: one experiences peak motivation when working on a task that is right on the edge of one’s current abilities.
To achieve a state of flow and keep being motivated a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability.
The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom.
Sweet spot is where half of the time you get what you want, half of the time you don’t.
Professionals stick to the schedule, amateurs let life get in the way. You might not enjoy it, but still find a way to put in the reps.
The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over again.
Habits + deliberate practice = MASTERY. You can’t repeat the same things blindly and expect to become exceptional.
Establish a system for reflection and review.
Example of Pat Riley as coach of the L.A. Lakers who established measures for performance of every players progress.
„Sustaining an effort is the most important thing for any entreprise. The way to be successful is to learn how to do things the right way, then do them that same way every time.“ – Pat Riley
Examples:
- Kipchoge takes notes after every practice
- Chris Rock and Kevin Hart test programs in small clubs first.
- Executives & investors keep decision journals. The record decisions of each week and document why they made them and what the expected outcome was.
„Keep your identity small.“ – Paul Graham. Instead of saying „I’m a CEO.“, say „I’m the type of person who builds and creates things.“
The holy grail of habit change:
Not a single 1 percent improvement, but thousands of them. Success is not a goal to reach, it’s a system to follow and improve, an endless process to refine.
It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop.
Small habits don’t add up. They compound.
With a big enough why you can overcome every how.
Results don’t lie.
Reward is on the other side of sacrifice.
Being curious is better than being smart, because it implies taking action.

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