Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

But it was not until my senior season that my sleep habits, study habits, and strength-training habits really began to pay off.

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However, looking back on those years, I believe I accomplished something just as rare: I fulfilled my potential.

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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 entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant has said, “To write a great book, you must first become the book.”

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had to rely on small habits to rebound from my injury, to get stronger in the gym, to perform at a high level on the field, to become a writer, to build a successful

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business, and simply to develop into a responsible adult.

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Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.

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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.

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Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.

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

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Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.

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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.

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Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change.

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FORGET ABOUT GOALS, FOCUS ON SYSTEMS INSTEAD

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What’s the difference between systems and goals? It’s a distinction I first learned from Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the Dilbert comic. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.

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If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal might be to build a million-dollar business. Your system is how you test product ideas, hire employees, and run marketing campaigns.

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

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Problem #2: Achieving a goal is only a momentary change.

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Problem #3: Goals restrict your happiness.

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Problem #4: Goals are at odds with long-term progress.

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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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Habits like exercise, meditation, journaling, and cooking are reasonable for a day or two and then become a hassle.

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Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.

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Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.

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True behavior change is identity change.

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The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult it is to change it.

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The more evidence you have for a belief, the more strongly you will believe it.

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Ultimately, your habits matter because they help you become the type of person you wish to be. They are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself. Quite literally, you become your habits.

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Whenever the conditions are right, you can draw on this memory and automatically apply the same solution.

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If a behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit.

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How to Create a Good Habit

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How to Break a Bad Habit

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The human brain is a prediction machine.

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We underestimate how much our brains and bodies can do without thinking.

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This is one of the most surprising insights about our habits: you don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin.

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This is what makes habits useful. It’s also what makes them dangerous.

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As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

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This process, known as Pointing-and-Calling, is a safety system designed to reduce mistakes. It seems silly, but it works incredibly well. Pointing-and-Calling reduces errors by up to 85 percent and cuts accidents by 30 percent.

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The process of behavior change always starts with awareness.

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The sentence they filled out is what researchers refer to as an implementation intention, which is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a particular habit.

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The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence: I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

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HABIT STACKING: A SIMPLE PLAN TO OVERHAUL YOUR HABITS

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Fogg’s habit stacking formula is: “After I [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”

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Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time.

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As Charles Darwin noted, “In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

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We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them.

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Of course, peer pressure is bad only if you’re surrounded by bad influences.

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Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.

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It’s friendship and community that embed a new identity and help behaviors last over the long run.

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For example, one study found that when a chimpanzee learns an effective way to crack nuts open as a member of one group and then switches to a new group that uses a less effective strategy, it will avoid using the superior nut cracking method just to blend in with the rest of the chimps.

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As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.”

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Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself.

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But more often than not, we do it because motion allows us to feel like we’re making progress without running the risk of failure.

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If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection.

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The amount of time you have been performing a habit is not as important as the number of times you have performed it. Skip Notes * A similar story is told in the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It has been adapted here with permission. See the endnotes for a full explanation.

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But the truth is, our real motivation is to be lazy and to do what is convenient. And despite what the latest productivity best seller will tell you, this is a smart strategy, not a dumb one.

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The point is to master the habit of showing up.

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What feels like fun to me, but work to others?

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What makes me lose track of time?

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Where do I get greater returns than the average person? We

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What comes naturally to me?

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Play a game that favors your strengths. If you can’t find a game that favors you, create one.

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Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on. Skip Notes *1 If you are interested in taking a personality test, you can find links to the most reliable tests here: atomichabits.com/personality. *2 If it’s Harry Potter on repeat, I feel you.

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They found that to achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 percent beyond your current ability. In real life it’s typically not feasible to quantify the difficulty of an action in this way, but the core idea of the Goldilocks Rule remains: working on challenges of just manageable difficulty—something on the perimeter of your ability—seems crucial for maintaining motivation. Improvement

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“At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.”

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The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and failure.

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There have been a lot of days I’ve felt like relaxing, but I’ve never regretted showing up and working on something that was important to me.

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Establish a system for reflection and review.

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