Atomic Habits by James Clear is a great book. I think it’s applicable to everyone, no matter your goals in life. I would highly recommend reading it in full. Here are my Atomic Habits Notes.
Atomic Habits: Small habits that have a big impact on your life.
The power of atomic habits
Aggregation of marginal gains. A 1% gain every day adds up to insane gains. Compounding interest is a powerful tool in both finances, but also in improving your life.
To demonstrate, here is a graph showing a 1% increase vs a 1% decrease in performance every day for 1 year.
1% Better Every Day
As you can see, a 1% gain every day for a year will result in 37 times the original after just 1 year. Conversely, 1% worse each day will result in just 3% of the original in the same time.
It is only when looking back years that the results really show, not days. You don’t see muscle gains after 1 day at the gym. You won’t see the benefits of the work you put into your business until months or years later.
Success is the product of daily habits, not one time transformations. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than your current results. If you’re a millionaire, but you spend more than you make, you won’t be a millionaire for long. If you’re broke, but you save a little bit each month, you’re on the path to financial freedom – even if you’re moving slower than you’d like.
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. Just don’t expect short term changes in what you do to effect you right away. It will take time.
Both good and bad habits compound. One task a day is a small feat, but over a year it adds up to a lot of work done. One-time stress events aren’t that bad, but add them up, and they compound. Sitting in traffic feels awful when you’ve been at work all day, but when you’re on vacation, it doesn’t seem to matter as much.
Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required for major change. Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds root systems, but then it explodes eighty feet into the air within six weeks.
Complaining about not achieving success despite working hard is like complaining about an ice cube not melting when you heat it up from 25 to 31 degrees. Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. All the action happens at 32 degrees.
Habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance, and when you finally break through, people will call it an overnight success.
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stone cutter 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.
– Jacob A. Riis
Forget about goals, focus on systems.
Goals are good for setting direction, but you need a system to help you get there. Break things down into smaller and smaller tasks until they’re do-able.
Focus on who you want to be instead of what you want to do.
How your habits shape your identity (and vice versa)
Focus on your identity and beliefs. Become the type of person who does great things instead of just trying to do great things.
The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. 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.
- The goal is not to read a book, but become a reader.
- The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
- The goal is not to create a successful company, but to become an Entrepreneur.
The Two Steps to changing your identity
- When you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organized person.
- When you write each day, you embody the identity of a creative person.
- When you train each day, you embody the identity of an athletic person.
Identity: is literally “repeating beingness”.. – i.e.: you are what you do.
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
- Playing video games ⇾ you are a gamer
- Programming ⇾ you are a coder
- Go to the gym ⇾ you are a fit person
- Procrastinate ⇾ you are a lazy person
- Work on your company ⇾ you are an entrepreneur
You don’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior, your goal is simply to win most of the time. The more you practice bad habits, the more ingrained those bad habits become.
1. Decide the type of person you want to be.
2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
- Would a healthy person order a burrito or a salad?
- Would a successful person work on their startup or watch YouTube videos?
- Would a fit person go to the gym multiple times a week, or skip it to play video games?
You become your habits.
How to build better habits in 4 simple steps
Behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated, and those followed by unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.
As habits form, the level of activity in the brain decreases. You learn to lock on to the cues that predict a dopamine response and tune out everything else. A choice that once required effort is now automatic. Whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the non-conscious mind to do automatically. When you do something over and over, the literal neurons in your brain form paths in a way to make that action easier. The purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life (survive, reproduce, etc.). We evolved to do just 2 main things, habits are a simple way to get us to repeat the actions that have worked for us thus far, and stay away from the things that have caused us harm.
The 4 stages of a habit are cue, craving, response, reward.
These differ person to person. For a gambler, the sound of a slot machine may trigger the desire to gamble. For someone else, it may just be background noise. For a smoker, the smell of a cigarette may trigger the craving to smoke, while someone else may be repulsed by the smell.
The habit feedback loop. The cue causes you to feel a craving, the craving makes you respond, the response provides a reward, and the reward makes you want to repeat the cycle again in hopes of another reward.
Examples:
Cue: You wake up.
Craving: You want to feel alert.
Response: You drink a cup of coffee.
Reward: You feel alert.
You now associate waking up with drinking coffee.
Cue: You get to a big task on your to-do list.
Craving: You feel overwhelmed and want a distraction.
Response: You pull out your phone and check social media.
Reward: You satisfy your craving to feel distracted.
You now associate pulling out your phone and checking social media with getting to a new task on your to-do list.
How to make a good habit: make the cue obvious, make the craving attractive, the response easy, and the reward satisfying.
How to make a bad habit: make the cue invisible, the craving unattractive, the response difficult, and the reward unsatisfying.
The first law: make it obvious
As habits form, your actions come under the direction of your automatic and non-conscious mind.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.
Carl Jung.
Consider making a habits Scorecard to become more aware of your behavior. Write down a list of your habits and if they’re good or bad. For example:
Wake up (neutral)
Check my phone (bad)
Go to the bathroom (neutral)
Take a shower (good)
Brush my teeth (good)
etc.
Becoming more aware of the things you do without thinking about them will help you to kick habits that you don’t want.
Implementation intentions: When x happens, I will perform response Y. I will [behavior] at [time] in [location].
Creating implementation intentions will dramatically help you stick to your goals. There is a big difference in the rate of success between someone saying “I will start working out this year” to “I will go to the gym every Monday and Wednesday at 6:00”
Consider writing out your clearly defined intentions instead of just keeping them in your head.
Habit stacking:
- After I take off my work shoes, I will change into my workout clothes.
- After I finish my dinner, I will do the dishes.
- After I pour my coffee, I will meditate.
- After I sit down at my desk, I will begin my work. (instead of watching YouTube)
- After [current habit] I will [new habit]
Shape your environment to manage cues
Our environment shapes our behavior. If there is a plate of cookies on the table when you walk in the room, you’re likely to grab one, even if you didn’t want a cookie when you walked in the room. So the solution is simple, remove the cookies. I have a bad habit of cleaning my ears with q-tips, even though I know the wax is natural and shouldn’t be removed. I tried to stop myself from cleaning my ears, but it was too difficult. Every time I saw the q-tips, I would reach for one. As soon as I moved them, so I stopped seeing them every day, I stopped the habit. Sometimes you can’t remove a cue, but if you can, start there.
The human body has 11 million sensory receptors. About 10 million of them are dedicated to sight, so visual cues are the most important thing to focus on.
- It’s easy to not practice piano when it’s tucked away in a closet.
- It’s easy to not read a book when it’s hidden in a desk.
- It’s easy to open YouTube when it’s bookmarked.
Try moving your apps into a folder and then seeing how much easier it is to not use those apps until your brain gets used to opening the folder.
When you step outside your usual environment, you leave your old habit cues behind.
Cut bad habits off at the source, if you can’t seem to get any work done because you keep browsing social media on your phone, leave your phone in another room while you work. If you keep opening a video game, remove the icon from your desktop. If those things don’t work, consider just uninstalling the apps/programs; potentially for the day, and reinstalling them at the end of the day. There are also programs that can block app or website usage between certain times. If you can’t stop spending money on new keyboards, stop reading reviews and unsubscribe to r/MechanicalKeyboards.
In short: Self control is a short-time solution. Optimize your environment.
The second law: make it attractive
Supernormal Stimuli; an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency, or any stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which it evolved.
- Social media gives more likes and praise than we could ever get in a group outing.
- Video games give you the feeling of progress at a much higher rate than you’ll ever get in the real world.
- Junk food gives you more calories than you’d ever get back in the hunter-gatherer times.
- X-rated content makes you feel like you’re having sex without any of the effort required to do it in real life.
In A; before a habit is learned, you get pleasure from the reward… But as it becomes a habit, as seen in B, you actually get pleasure before the reward. You get the pleasure in anticipation of the reward.
Dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but when you expect it.
We need to make our habits attractive, so we will want to do them.
Bundle things you need to do, with things you want to do. If you want to watch a YouTube video, but you need to make sales calls, you could say: For every sales call I make, I can watch a YouTube video. Of course, change this depending on how difficult each task is. So you might want to make 3 sales calls to watch 1 episode of a show, or write 1 sentence for each chip you eat. You’ll need to come up with ideas that work for your wants and your goals.
The hope is that eventually you will look forward to doing the thing you need to do, because it means you will get to do the thing you want to do. Keep in mind that this connection will take a while to be made in the brain. So don’t expect it to come right away.
Surround yourself with the types of people you want to be like. Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. (and you already have something in common with the group). This will help you want to do the behavior because we naturally want to fit in.
Every craving you have can be boiled down to human nature.
- You want to eat ice cream? We need food for survival.
- You want to watch X-rated content? That’s the natural desire to reproduce.
- You want to procrastinate? That’s the desire to conserve energy.
Not everyone deals with cravings in the same way. Some people might feel stressed and smoke a cigarette. Some people might choose to go for a walk in nature instead. Habits are all about associations. You see a cue, and you do what has worked for you in the past. As I said before, two people can smell a cigarette, and one can be repulsed by the smell, while the other can get a craving for one.
You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience. Re-frame your habits to highlight the benefits instead of the downsides.
- You don’t have to code all day, you get to do a job that pays well, lets you work from anywhere, etc.
- You don’t have to make a sales call, you get to work on your people skills.
- You don’t have to post content on your blog, you get to share your thoughts with the world.
- You don’t have to go for a run, you get to better your health.
This can boil down to: look at the bright side of things. It sounds simple, and maybe even too easy… but generally in life you can believe things if you just want to. If you want to be confident, just pretend to be someone who’s confident, and eventually you won’t have to pretend. The same goes for anything in life.
This is probably a very controversial statement, but if you pretend to be happy, eventually, you will be. The block for some people is that when you’re depressed, you don’t want to be happy. Or rather, you don’t want to pretend. You don’t have the energy to go through the motions that a happy person would go through. In order to become what you want to become, you need to continuously cast votes for that identity. That is very hard to do when you are depressed. This may not be true for everyone, but it works for me. I pretend to be successful first, and then I actually became successful later. I pretend to be happy first, and then I became happy later. If you keep pretending, eventually you won’t need to.
The third law: make it easy
Quantity gives you practice. You don’t need to be perfect.
Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups. Everyone on the left side of the classroom, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. 100 photos would rate an A, 90 photos a B, 80 photos a C, and so on.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.
At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills.
Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.
Adapted from Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
Motion vs Action. Motion is coming up with a new diet plan. Action is sticking to it when lunch rolls around. Motion is planning to go to the gym after work. Action is actually going. Motion is writing a to-do list, action is actually doing the work that you planned out.
Sometimes motion is useful, but it won’t lead to results without action. It’s easy to be in motion and convince yourself that you’re making progress. You might say “I’ve got conversations going with 4 potential clients right now” or “I brainstormed some ideas for articles to write”. Motion makes you feel like you’re getting something done, but really, you’re just preparing to get things done. And when preparation becomes procrastination, you need to change something. You need real world practice. Stop waiting until you’re perfect. The key is to start with repetition, not perfection. Launch your app before it’s ready (build an MVP). Stop trying to have a million features before you start selling. Just get to it! Start doing push-ups before you build out your entire workout routine. Stop eating snacks throughout the day before you build a comprehensive meal plan. Inaction is death.
How long does it take to form a new habit? Every time you repeat an action, you are activating a neural circuit associated with that habit, and this means simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding your habit. It’s not how long, but how many.
The habit line
The more you do something, the easier it is to do. Duh.
The law of least effort
The law of least effort: The basic behavioral hypothesis that an organism will choose a course of action that appears to require the smallest amount of effort or expenditure of energy. Also called law of least action; least effort principle.
Make your habits as easy as possible. Remove friction. If you want to eat healthy, meal prep, that way when it’s time for lunch you can grab your pre-cut cantelope instead of having to take the time to cut it in the middle of your work day. If you want to read before bed, then when you wake up, set a book on your pillow. The opposite also applies, when you want to stop using social media, log out when you’re done using it. Add friction to tasks you don’t want to repeat, and remove friction from tasks you do want to repeat.
The two-minute rule
Start small. Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your habit is to put on your running shoes. Make the habit something super easy to leads into the larger goal. Even if you only last 2 minutes, you’re casting votes for the type of person you want to be. You’re not focused on losing weight, you’re focused on becoming the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. It’s better to do less than nothing at all.
Habits can be completed in a few second, but continue to impact your behavior for minutes or hours afterwards. My habit of checking my YouTube subscriptions first thing in the morning leads to me watching YouTube videos until 10am. Simple solutions: don’t check YouTube first thing in the morning; unsubscribe from channels that aren’t providing value anymore; be more selective with which videos I watch, set a timer and when it goes off, stop watching. Any of these solutions would help with that problem.
The difference between a good and bad day is often a few good choices at decisive moments.
How to make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible
Create commitment devices. Lock in your future actions while your mind is in the right place, instead of waiting to see where your desires will take you in the moment.
Some one-time actions cost some effort now, but will pay off over time. A single choice can deliver returns again and again.
Examples: Remove your TV from your bedroom. Buy an alarm clock and leave your phone outside your room when you sleep. Unsubscribe from emails, mute group chats and turn off all notifications. Enroll in an automatic savings plan, or create monthly recurring transfers from your checking account to your investment account on the day you get paid. Social media can be blocked with a website blocker. The average person spends over 2 hours per day on social media. What could you get done with an extra 730 hours per year?
Use technology to automate your habits where possible, and when it’s not, make them as friction-less as possible.
The fourth law: make it satisfying
What is rewarded is repeated, what is punished is avoided.
The first 3 laws increase the odds that a behavior will be performed. The 4th law increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated. It completes the loop. We need an immediate reward. We live in a delayed return environment, that is; when you do a good job at work, you get a paycheck in 2 weeks. When you go to the gym, you become fit slowly over the course of months to years. When you get a new client, you get paid after the work is done. The human brain didn’t evolve for that. It evolved for instant rewards. Kill a deer, get food to eat, etc.
The negative consequences of actions are often delayed, while the rewards are instant. Smoking a cigarette now might feel good, while it causes cancer in the future. Playing video games now might feel good, but if you aren’t making enough money to pay your bills on time, it will cause more stress in the long run. Gambling now might bring enjoyment, but it will cause untold stress when you’re done and see how much money you lost. If you want the pleasure right now, you will pay for it in the long run. If you’re willing to wait for the reward, the payoff is usually greater.
What is immediately rewarded is repeated, what is immediately punished is avoided.
The vital thing to getting a habit to stick is to make it feel successful. Even if it’s in a small way. The feeling is a signal that your effort paid off. The ending of your habit is the most remember-able and needs to be satisfying. If you feel proud of a job well done, you are more likely to repeat that habit in the long run.
A potential way to make a habit feel good is to track and share publicly what you’ve accomplished. For example, I might start doing weekly “what I’ve accomplished this week” posts. As soon as I finish something big, I can write about it.
How to stick with good habits every day
Use visual representations for your goals.
Dyrsmid, a 23-year-old stockbroker, began each morning with two jars on his desk. One was filled with 120 paper clips. The other was empty. As soon as he settled in each day, he would make a sales call. Immediately after, he would move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar, and the process would begin again.
I recommend using something like this: Loop Habit Tracker, here’s the link for Android. Another option would be to use graph paper or a template. I personally don’t like the printout that James Clear shared. I may make and share my own if I end up not liking the loop habit tracker app.
A habit tracker simultaneously makes a habit obvious, attractive, and satisfying.
You don’t have to use the template, moving the paperclips is a form of habit tracking. Some habit tracking is automatic. Take some time every month to review your credit card statement, for example, and you can see how often you eat out.
Bad workouts are the most important ones. It’s not about what happens during the workout, but being the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts.
With all this said, be careful with what you track, we optimize for what we measure.
Accountability partner
Create a habit contract. A verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to something, and a punishment if you don’t follow through. Then you find accountability partners and have them sign off with you. A habit contract should have the following:
- Your objective
- Your consequence if you don’t follow through
- Who will you report to?
- Both parties should sign and date.
Habits Cheat Sheet – How to build a new habit
| The 1st Law | Make it Obvious |
| 1.1 | Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them. |
| 1.2 | Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” |
| 1.3 | Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” |
| 1.4 | Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible. |
| The 2nd Law | Make It Attractive |
| 2.1 | Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do. |
| 2.2 | Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. |
| 2.3 | Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit. |
| The 3rd Law | Make It Easy |
| 3.1 | Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits. |
| 3.2 | Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier. |
| 3.3 | Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact. |
| 3.4 | Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less. |
| 3.5 | Automate your habits. Invest in technology and onetime purchases that lock in future behavior. |
| The 4th Law | Make It Satisfying |
| 4.1 | Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit. |
| 4.2 | Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits. |
| 4.3 | Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain.” |
| 4.4 | Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately. |
Habits Cheat Sheet – How to break an old habit
| Inversion of the 1st Law | Make It Invisible |
| 1.5 | Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment. |
| Inversion of the 2nd Law | Make It Unattractive |
| 2.4 | Reframe your mindset. Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits. |
| Inversion of the 3rd Law | Make It Difficult |
| 3.6 | Increase friction. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits. |
| 3.7 | Use a commitment device. Restrict your future choices to the ones that benefit you. |
| Inversion of the 4th Law | Make It Unsatisfying |
| 4.5 | Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behavior. |
| 4.6 | Create a habit contract. Make the costs of your bad habits public and painful. |
The truth about talent and genes
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition. People are born with different abilities. Competence is highly dependent on context. You can be good at something, but you can’t be good at everything.
Habits need to be enjoyable if they are to stick. Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.
Combine your skills. When you can’t be better, be different. If you’re in the top 10% of 3 different fields, then assuming equal distribution, if you combine those fields into one, you will be in the top 0.1%. You might not be the best programmer, but if you’re top 10% with programming and art, you will have an easier time making solo video games than someone who is top 2% in programming but below average (50%) in art.
Specialization is a powerful way to overcome genetics.
How to stay motivated
Work on things that are not too hard, but not too easy. Try to get in the flow state as often as possible by working on things of just manageable difficulty.
Once the beginner gains have been made, our interest starts to fade. It’s about who can handle the boredom. There will be days when you feel like quitting. There will be days when you don’t feel like showing up. But stepping up when it’s annoying, or painful, or boring… that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.
You will almost never regret putting the work in after it’s done. Remember that.
The downside of good habits
When you can do it “good enough” on autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better.
Establish a system for reflection and review.
Choose times (every month, twice a year, etc.) to reflect and review your performance over time. This will give you a better picture of how you are performing.
Conclusion
The writings of Erasmus, originally read as follows: “If 10 coins are not enough to make a man rich, what if you add 1 coin? What if you add another? Another? Eventually you must admit that he is rich. Furthermore, you will have to say that 1 coin made him so.”
Can one tiny change transform your life? It’s unlikely you would say so… but what if you made another, and another, and another. At some point, you will have to admit that your life was transformed by one small change. Success is not a goal to reach, but a system to improve. Small habits don’t add up, they compound.
James Clear says: “happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire.”
However, I do have to disagree with that one, as happy is literally defined as the feeling of pleasure. What he is describing is content, or satisfaction.
Being curious is better than being smart. It is desire, not intelligence, that prompts behavior.
The reason we continually grasp for the latest get rich quick or weight loss scheme is that new plans offer hope because we don’t have any experiences to ground our expectations. As Aristotle noted, “Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.” A new idea will often be more exciting than the one we are currently working on, but only because we lack any information on it.
Business:
Personalize as much as possible. Make the customer feel special.
Subject: “I wanted to share this with you.” vs “Hi Mr. Piz, I wanted to share this with you, I think it might help.”
Humans are heavily influenced by the crowd. If you can show a customer that other people like them use your product – people in their zip code, from their hometown, on their team, etc. – they will be more likely to find it attractive themselves.
Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.
One way to employ the 4th Law is to drop in little bits of satisfaction throughout the experience. For example, car manufacturers have begun to add fake engine noise to their cars and trucks to create a satisfying growl when the owner punches the accelerator.
Many electronic slot machines strategically employ the near-miss effect. Imagine pulling the lever, watching the wheels rotate, and seeing two cherries line up—but the third cherry narrowly misses. You almost won the jackpot. That “almost” feeling tricks your brain into predicting the reward is now closer than before. With a little more work, you might be able to get it. After a near-miss, the reward system in your brain will light up with anticipation. Many machines are intentionally programmed to deliver near-misses more frequently than would arise by pure chance. By teasing a jackpot, the designers make the game more engaging, but they are also deceiving users by making them feel like a win is closer even though the odds of winning are no better than before.
When advertising, combine wants and needs to make your product more attractive.
For example: You need me to make you a website, because you want more customers.
I. The Fundamentals: Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference
- The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
- Small, consistent changes add up to big changes over time. By changing our habits, we can change our lives.
- How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
- When a habit becomes part of our identity, it motivates us to maintain it. Saying “I’m the kind of person who…” reinforces our habits and progress.
- How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps
- The habit loop has 4 steps: cue, craving, response, reward. Make the cue obvious, the craving attractive, the response easy, and the reward satisfying.
II. The 1st Law: Make It Obvious
- The Man Who Didn’t Look Right
- List all your daily habits and mark each as good or bad. This ‘Habit Scorecard’ helps you identify which cues trigger certain habits for improvement.
- The Best Way to Start a New Habit
- Use an implementation intention, a specific plan for when and where you’ll perform a new habit. Stack new habits with existing ones to make them easier.
- Motivation is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More
- Your environment shapes your habits. For example, one person might read on their couch, while another might watch TV and snack.
- The Secret to Self-Control
- Make cues for good habits more visible and cues for bad habits less noticeable to improve self-control.
III. The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive
- How to Make a Habit Irresistible
- Desire drives our behavior. The anticipation and craving for something motivates us to act.
- The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping Your Habits
- Join a culture where your desired behavior is the norm. This environment supports and reinforces good habits.
- How to Find and Fix the Causes of Your Bad Habits
- Make bad habits unattractive by highlighting the benefits of avoiding them. For example, not smoking means you won’t smell bad around your family.
IV. The 3rd Law: Make It Easy
- Walk Slowly, but Never Backward
- Practice is the most effective way to learn. Take small, easy actions repeatedly without worrying about the perfect method.
- The Law of Least Effort
- Make the first step to a habit easy and within reach. For instance, set your workout gear out before bed if you want to exercise in the morning.
- How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule
- Start a habit by doing it for just 2 minutes. Often, you’ll end up doing more once you start.
- How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible
- Make bad habits difficult and automate good ones. For example, put your phone in another room while working or set up automatic savings.
V. The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying
- The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change
- Make the reward for a habit immediately satisfying. For example, take a hot bath after exercising.
- How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day
- Track your habits right after doing them for a satisfying sense of progress.
- How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything
- Use an accountability partner or group to add pressure and cost to inaction, helping you stay on track.
VI. Advanced Tactics: How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great
- The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)
- Understand your strengths and weaknesses. Choose habits that play to your strengths for better success.
- The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work
- Start with easy habits, then gradually make them harder to stay engaged without getting bored.
- The Downside of Creating Good Habits
- Good habits help us act without thinking but can make us overlook small errors. To reach mastery, combine habits with deliberate practice and reflection.
| The 1st Law | Make it Obvious |
| 1.1 | Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them. |
| 1.2 | Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].” |
| 1.3 | Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].” |
| 1.4 | Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible. |
| The 2nd Law | Make It Attractive |
| 2.1 | Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do. |
| 2.2 | Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. |
| 2.3 | Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit. |
| The 3rd Law | Make It Easy |
| 3.1 | Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits. |
| 3.2 | Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier. |
| 3.3 | Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact. |
| 3.4 | Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less. |
| 3.5 | Automate your habits. Invest in technology and onetime purchases that lock in future behavior. |
| The 4th Law | Make It Satisfying |
| 4.1 | Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit. |
| 4.2 | Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits. |
| 4.3 | Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain.” |
| 4.4 | Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately. |