Atomic Habits
Highlights
If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers.
It’s the PROCESS.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results… Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.
The biggest barrier to positive change at any level—individual, team, society—is identity conflict… 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.”
The Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases… One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.
Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationship to them. In fact, this is a useful way to think about the influence of the environment on your behavior. Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.
We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: the close, the many, and the powerful.
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 preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.
People who are better at delaying gratification have higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obseity, better responses to stress, and superior social skills.
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.
Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. 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.
This is one of my favorite “laws.”
If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore.
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 most satisfying to you: What feels like fun to me, but work to others? What makes me lose track of time? Where do I get greater returns than the average person? What comes naturally to me?
A good player works hard to win the game everyone else is playing. A great player creates a new game that favors their strengths and avoids their weaknesses.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
This seems obvious but in many ways it’s not. I think we all get trapped working on things that are too easy or far too hard—finding that sweet spot isn’t as easy as it sounds.
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.
When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that thing and you lose yourself.
I really love this.
It is the idea of pleasure that we chase… happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue. Desire is pursued. Pleasure ensues from action.
Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems… Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Your desires are not running rampant. You do not crave a change in state. Your mind does not generate a problem for you to solve. You’re simply observing and existing.
With a big enough why you can overcome any how. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and poet, famously wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action. Being smart will never deliver results on its own because it doesn’t get you to act. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior. As Naval Ravikant says, “The trick to doing anything is first cultivating a desire for it.”
Suffering drives progress. The source of all suffering is the desire for a change in state. This is also the source of all progress. It is wanting more that pushes humanity to seek improvements, develop new technologies, and reach for a higher level. With craving, we are dissatisfied but driven. Without craving, we are satisfied but lack ambition.