Highlights
Introduction
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A habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly—and, in many cases, automatically.
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changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.
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The backbone of this book is my four-step model of habits—cue, craving, response, and reward—and the four laws of behavior change that evolve out of these steps.
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Human behavior is always changing: situation to situation, moment to moment, second to second. But this book is about what doesn’t change. It’s about the fundamentals of human behavior. The lasting principles you can rely on year after year. The ideas you can build a business around, build a family around, build a life around.
THE FUNDAMENTALS Why Tiny Changes Make a Big Difference
1 The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
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WHY SMALL HABITS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE
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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.
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Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.
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Unfortunately, the slow pace of transformation also makes it easy to let a bad habit slide.
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it doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success.
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Are you reading books and learning something new each day? Tiny battles like these are the ones that will define your future self.
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You need to know how habits work and how to design them to your liking, so you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade.
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WHAT PROGRESS IS REALLY LIKE
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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 are delayed. This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last.
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FORGET ABOUT GOALS, FOCUS ON SYSTEMS INSTEAD
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The only way to actually win is to get better each day.
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Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
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That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results.
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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.
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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.
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A SYSTEM OF ATOMIC HABITS
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You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
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By now, you’ve probably realized that an atomic habit refers to a tiny change, a marginal gain, a 1 percent improvement. But atomic habits are not just any old habits, however small. They are little habits that are part of a larger system. Just as atoms are the building blocks of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of remarkable results.
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This is the meaning of the phrase atomic habits—a regular practice or routine that is not only small and easy to do, but also the source of incredible power; a component of the system of compound growth.
2 How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
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Changing our habits is challenging for two reasons: (1) we try to change the wrong thing and (2) we try to change our habits in the wrong way.
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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.
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“behaviors followed by satisfying consequences tend to be repeated and those that produce unpleasant consequences are less likely to be repeated.”
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Whenever you face a problem repeatedly, your brain begins to automate the process of solving it. Your habits are just a series of automatic solutions that solve the problems and stresses you face regularly.
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As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases. You learn to lock in on the cues that predict success and tune out everything else.
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There is no longer a need to analyze every angle of a situation. Your brain skips the process of trial and error and creates a mental rule: if this, then that.
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The primary reason the brain remembers the past is to better predict what will work in the future.
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Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time. As a result, your brain is always working to preserve your conscious attention for whatever task is most essential. Whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the nonconscious mind to do automatically. This is precisely what happens when a habit is formed. Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.
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The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. It is a bit of information that predicts a reward.