Atomic Habits Summary

The power of habits is the aggregation of marginal gains. Making yourself 1% better each day may not have an immediate noticeable impact, but it will create the most drastic long-term success. If you can make yourself 1% better each day at the end of a year, you will have improved thirty-seven times.

Habits are like compound interest for self-improvement.

Good habits make time your ally, while bad habits make time an enemy.

Breakthrough moments often appear instantaneous. Instead, they result from repetitive habits building up over time.

People are often disappointed not to achieve linear improvement from habits, but habits are exponential. They appear not to yield much result but then explode after some inflection point.

It is more beneficial to focus on habits that address processes than goals.

Atomic habits are tiny changes that provide 1% marginal gains that can be combined into a more extensive system of habits.

Your habits shape your identity (and vice versa)

We often fail at creating patterns for one of two reasons:

1. We try to change the wrong thing
2. We try to change our habits the wrong way

We can change our habits at three levels: outcomes, processes or identity. People focus on their results, but this approach is far less practical than changing one’s identity.

The best form of motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. The more pride you take in an aspect of your identity, the more time you will put into maintaining and improving the associated habits. Your behaviours are usually a reflection of your identity.

When you make your bed each day, you embody the identity of an organised person, and the more you repeat that behaviour, the more you reinforce the identity associated with the behaviour.

There is a simple two-step plan to create new identities:

1. Decide the type of person you want to be.
2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.

Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits. Your habits are important because they help you become the person you want to be.

Four steps of building habits

Habits are reliable solutions to recurring problems. They allow your brain activity to decrease as you automatically select some action. Habits reduce your cognitive load so you can reallocate your effort to more novel situations.

When you have a set of well-tuned habits, your mind is free for new challenges and to master new problems.

Building habits can be divided into four steps: cue, craving, response and reward.

Cues trigger cravings and motivate a response that provides a reward. Breaking any of these steps will break the habit. If the cue is eliminated, the habit will not start; if there is no craving, there is no motivation to act; if the response is too tricky, it will not be done; and if the reward is not satisfying, the habit will not persist.

These steps map to four framework stages to create good and eliminate bad habits.

Cues

With enough repetition and practice, we unconsciously pick up on cues and encode behaviours with them.

You do not need to be aware of a cue for a habit to form. As a habit forms, your actions become unconscious.

Over time, the cues that spark habits become invisible. Our responses to these cues become so embedded that the response appears to come out of nowhere.

We need to control our existing habits before effectively building new ones. If a habit is automatic and mindless, expecting to improve is unreasonable.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

– Carl Jung

The Pointing-and-calling process is a method for naming and identifying your behaviours to keep them in your conscious mind. Details of your behaviour are pointed at and named aloud. This reduces errors by up to 85% and accidents by 30%. Point-and-calling is so effective because it brings awareness into your conscious mind.

Many failures in performance are due to a lack of self-awareness. The most significant challenge in changing habits is maintaining awareness of our actions.

Hearing your bad habits spoken out loud makes the consequences seem more real. Just saying you will do something increases the odds you do it.

The Habit Scorecard is an exercise where you list all of your daily habits. Once you have a list, mark each habit with a +, - or = depending on whether that habit effectively supports your desired identity. There is no need to change or judge habits; bring your habits to your awareness.

An Implementation intention is a plan about where and when to act. The two most common cues we react to are time and location, so the implementation intention uses them. I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

Lacking motivation is often just a symptom of a lack of clarity in intentions. This is what implementation intentions aim to address.

Being specific about your goals and how you will achieve them helps you say no to distractions. We often say yes to requests because we need clarification on what we should do instead.

The Diderot Effect states that obtaining new possessions often leads to additional purchases.

You often decide what to do next based on what you just did.

Habit Stacking is the practice of attaching new habits to existing habits. After [CURRENT HABBIT], I will [NEW HABIT]. Examples of habit stacking are:

• Social skills: When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to someone I do not know.
• Finances: When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait twenty-four hours
• Minimalism: I will give something away when I buy a new item.

A person’s behaviour is a function of the person and the environment B = f(P, E). The environment is hugely important in influencing behaviour. People often buy products based on where they are rather than what the products are.

Humans have about eleven million sensory receptors, ten million dedicated to sight. As much as half of the brain’s resources are dedicated to sight. This makes visual cues the most effective for changing habits.

To make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. Alter your space to increase exposure to positive cues and eliminate negative ones.

A habit can start from a single cue but, over time, become associated with several cues. In this way, the entire context informs the behaviour.

To change an environment, consider your relationship to the objects in the environment. This is more helpful than thinking about the objects in the environment.

Habits are easier to change in new environments. Moving to a new location removes all your old habits and makes room for the new habits you want to create. When you receive multiple cues from your environment, the easier habit will stifle other habits.

If you cannot move to an entirely new environment, rearrange your existing one. Create a separate place for each habit.

Avoid mixing the context of multiple habits. When you mix contexts, the easier habit will win out. This is a big problem with technology. So many multi-purpose devices make positive habits difficult in the face of easier, less productive ones. Using your phone to play games, relax or watch videos makes it challenging to use as a productivity device.

If you have limited space in your environment, you can divide the space into multiple zones. This also works for your digital environment. Each habit should have a home, and habits should not share homes.

Research:

Robert Steele and Morgan Murphy discovered that 15% of Vietnam service members were addicted to heroin. Followup research showed that 35% of service members had tried heroin while 20% were addicted.

After the war, Lee Robins found that upon returning home, only 5% became re-addicted within a year and only 12% relapsed within three years.

Nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam broke the habit when they returned home after the war.

When the context and cues of war were removed, the associated habits vanished. Changing the environment can greatly impact your ability to break bad habits.

People with high levels of self-control are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require immense willpower and self-control. They spend less time in tempting situations.

The way to improve your grit, perseverance and willpower is to create a more disciplined environment.

Bad habits tend to be autocatalytic: they feed off themselves. When you watch TV, you feel lazy, so you watch more TV…

When you break a habit, you are likely to remember it long-term. If you reintroduce the cues even long after the habit is broken, there is a good chance you will reintroduce the habit. In the short term, you can overpower your temptations, but changing the environment is the only sustainable way to break a habit.

The most practical way to eliminate bad habits is to reduce the exposure to the cues that cause it.

Craving

A supernormal stimulus is a heightened version of reality. There are tons of supernormal stimuli around, and we are constantly manufacturing them, and they are being sold to us.

Society is filled with highly engineered versions of reality that are more attractive than the real world our ancestors evolved in.

We have the mental capacity to resist the temptation of our ancestors, but the stimulus of the modern world.

Research:

In 1954, scientists James Olds and Peter Milner blocked dopamine release in a group of rats. The rats lost the will to live. They had no cravings. Most rats died of thirst in a couple of days.

In a follow-up study, scientists blocked dopamine release in rats and then fed them sugar water. The rats still enjoyed the sugar, but they no longer craved it. The rats still liked sugar; they didn’t want it any more.

When more dopamine is added to their brains, animals will perform habits at much higher rates.

Every highly habit-forming behaviour is associated with high levels of dopamine production.

Dopamine is released when you experience pleasure and anticipate it; your motivation spikes whenever you anticipate a reward.

This is why anticipation of an experience is often a better feeling than the experience itself. Your brain has far more resources dedicated to wanting rewards than liking them. Every action is taken in anticipation of some reward or some wanting.

Temptation bundling links items you want to do with actions you need to do. ABC branded Thank Got It’s Thursday this way. They encouraged making popcorn, drinking red wine, and watching their evening schedule to associate the viewer’s desire to relax with a need to watch ABC.

Premack’s Principle states that more probable behaviours will reinforce less probable behaviours.

Habit stacking can be coupled with temptation bundling: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT]”

Laszlo Polgar deeply believed, “A genius is not born, but is educated and trained.” He decided to train his daughters to be chess prodigies from a very young age. They would be home-schooled and be surrounded by chess books, articles, and training. His daughters went on to become incredible chess players. One was Judit Polgar.

We take cues and form habits from the people around us. We are especially likely to form habits from people we are close to, powerful people, and the masses.

The closer someone is to us, the more likely we will pick up their habits. A person increases their chances of becoming obese by 57% if he or she has a friend who becomes obese.

One of the most effective ways to build habits is by joining a culture where your desired behaviour is the norm. Join a running club. It is even better to join a culture you have something in common with. If you are a software engineer, joining a software engineering running club is much more useful than a regular running club with people who may not share your interests.

We are incredibly persuadable by group behaviour. Studies show that people will make wrong decisions to fit into a group. When chimpanzees learned a new (better) way of cracking nuts as a member of one group but then returned to a group that cracked nuts the old way, they gave up on the technique they had learned.

The reward of being accepted by a group is often more appealing than winning an argument, looking smart, or finding the truth. “Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.”

We are drawn to behaviours that earn us respect, approval, admiration or status. We, therefore, are more likely to imitate the behaviour of the powerful or highly effective people we know.

Most cravings have a underlying primal craving associated with them. Conserving energy, obtaining food or water, finding love and reproducing, connecting or bonding, winning social approval, reducing uncertainty, and achieving status and prestige. We produce habits that are our default mechanism to achieve these root goals; when uncertain, I go to Google, but these habits may not be the only way or even the best way to achieve the goal.

What we want is to feel different. Our feelings and emotions guide our decisions and actions.

You can make hard habits more attractive by associating them with a positive feeling. Changing the thought “I have to achieve 100% unit testing” to “I get to spend a little extra time unit testing”. This simple change in mindset can affect our motivation.

Reframing your habits to highlight benefits is a quick way to make them more attractive. Instead of thinking you are nervous before a presentation, think that you are excited and getting a rush of adrenaline to help you focus.

Creating motivation rituals to get yourself in the right mindset for a certain activity is helpful. Play the same song before a game prepares your mind for the task.

Make It Easy (Response)

Jerry Uelsmann a professor at University of Florida did an experiment on his photography class. Half the class was graded on how many photos they submitted in a semester, the other half only had to submit one photo the entire semester and was graded on quality alone. The half that only focused on quantity submitted far better photos. They were experimenting and getting constant feedback and learning from their mistakes and trying new things while the other half were just thinking about the perfect photo and not getting feedback.

“The best is the enemy of the good”

There is a difference between being in motion and taking action. When you are in motion you are planning and strategizing and learning; but when you are action you are producing results and delivering outcomes. Being in motion can feel productive, but unless it’s supporting action it is useless. We tend to be in motion often as a defense mechanism because it is a safe risk free zone. This preperation and becomes a form of procrastination unless it is followed by action.

To master a habit the key bit is repetition, you need to be in action, not it motion. The planning does nothing for a habit.

Habits follow a predictable pattern from effortful practice to automatic behaviour. When first starting a habit it takes effort and willpower to do, but as the number of repetitions increase the behaviour becomes natural and effortless. This pattern is dependent on the number of repetitions of the behaviour, not the time period you practice the habit for. Habits form based on frequency, not time.

Instead of asking how long you need before a habit becomes automatic ask how many repetitions.

It is human nature to follow the path of least resistence, so in order to keep up a habit move it into the path of least resistence. You should aim to make a habit so easy that you’ll do it even on days when you don’t feel like it.

You can do hard things and build challenging habits, but some days you will feel more willing to do tough challenges than others. On days when you don’t feel great it is important to have a smooth frictionless environment to make the habit easy to continue.

In ‘lean production’ you relentlessy focus on any forms of waste and remove it. In the end you have an incredibly productive environment.

Most habit-forming products tend to remove little bits of friction from your life (meal delivery, online dating) all make the process of repeatingly using the product very easy.

To build good habits build an environment where doing the right thing is easy. Much of the battle of forming habits is reducing the friction assicated with good habits and increasing the friction of bad habits.

You can “reset the room” when you finish using it for a certain activity. After you are done using a space, you reset it and prepare it for the next activity. When you are done watching tv you can put the remote back into the cupboard. When you are done using the bathroom quickly wipe down the surfaces. This will make each space ready for your next habit building activity right when you need it.

When you organise a space for an intended purpose you are priming it to make your next action easy. You can also invert this idea and prime a space to make bad habits more difficult. When you are done watching tv you can unplug the tv and only plug it back in before you use it.

Researchers estimate that between 40 and 50% of our actions are done out of habit. Habits can be done in just a few seconds, but they also can shape the rest of our day by influencing what we do after the habit. This leads to a handful of decisive moments in a day that have outsized impact on what we do for the rest of the day.

You should fight the urge to start your habits with big efforts. It’s easy to start a big habit, but it is hard to maintain over time. When starting a habit you should start as small as possible. The two minute rule states “When y;ou start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do”. Almost all habits can be scaled down to two minutes.

• Read a single page
• Do one yoga pose
• Run to the end of the street and back

This strategy helps build a habit that is so easy you can keep it going through difficult days. You also build up your identity and someone who does this habit every day. Even if you only run for thirty seconds if you do it every day you are someone who runs every day.

The point is you are also mastering the habit of showing up, and building grit.

Instead of engineering the perfect habit from the beginning, do the easy habit on a consistent basis and look to tweak it later.

Additionally, with the two minute rule you always feel like you are below the threshold where your habit feels like work. Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and into a journal, but few do because it feels like a chore. But if you build a habit of writing less than you feel like you will never feel like you are doing work. Ernest Hemingway said to always stop writing when you are feeling good in order to feel like doing it again tomorrow.

In terms of building a habit it is better to do less than you hoped than nothing at all. Start by mastering the two minute version of your habit and grow from there.

Victor Hugo the author of the Hunchback of Notre Dame was having trouble finishing the book. Eventually he told his assistant to lock away all his cloths, and all he wore was a large shawl. Without wanting to go out he locked himself in his office and finished the book.

A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your future actions, like burning all your cloths forces you to not go out of the house. You can voluntarily ask to be added to the ban list at a casino to avoid gambling. Or you can ask a waiter at a restaurant to box up half your meal before it is brought out. These devices make certain behaviours in the future impossible.

The key with a commitment device is to change the task so it would take more effort not to do it than to do it (or visa versa).

The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impossible to do.

The average person could improve their lives simply by achieving employing half of these commitment devices:

• Buying a water filter so you drink clean water
• Use smaller plates to reduce how much food you eat
• Buy a good mattress
• Get blockout blinds
• Remove the tv from the bedroom (and phone)
• Unsubscribe from emails
• Turn off notifications for group messages
• Set your phone to silent
• Use email filters to clean up your inbox
• Delete games and social media apps from your phone
• Get a dog (happiness)
• get vaccinated
• Buy good shoes
• Buy a supportive chair and standing desk
• Enrol in an automatic savings progrfam
• setup automatic bill pay
• ask service provider to lower your bills

These are one off tasks that commit you to a better future.

Every Monday (the authors) assistant would reset all his social media passwords which would enable him to work distraction free all week. On Friday she would send him the passwords for the weekend.

Make it Satisfying

Tooth paste significantly improved peoples likelihood to brush their teeth by making the habit satisfying. They changed from having non flavoured tooth paste to offering satisfying flavours. Like cinnamon spearment and peppermint .

The first three laws of habits (make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy) increase the chances that a habit will be preformed this time, but only making a habit satisfying increases the chance that it will be preformed again.

As humans we are looking for immediate satisfaction.

Today we live in a delayed-return environment where we can work for years before our actions return the intended payoff. This is not how the human brain works, we have evolved to catch up with this new environment. We simply want immediate satisfaction.

Compared to the age of our brain, modern society is brand-new. Society is dramatically different than it was 500 years ago, but our brains have not evolved to catch up.

Time inconsistency is the idea that we value smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards.

When the immediate consequence of an action is favorable it almost always indicates that the later consequences will be unfavourable. The cost of good habits are the present and the cost of bad habits are the future.

The brains tendency to prioritize the present moment means you can’t rely on good intentions to sustain a good habit.

When you envision your future life it is easy to value the good habits, but in the moment instant gratification is much more valued.

Most people spend all day chasing instant gratification. If you are willing to wait for your reward you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. The last mile is always the least crowded.

You can make avoidance of good habits more visible to reduce the desirability of instant gratification. Open a saving account for a house and put money into it whenever you skip a menulog. It’s like creating a loyalty program for yourself. The immediate reward of seeing your money progress you towards your goals will balance the reward of menulog.

Making progress satisfying with visual markers is likely to make habits stick better, they reinforce your behaviour and add a little bit of immediate gratification to your habit. Like crossing of days on a calendar.

Focus on creating a streak or repetitions for your habit. Don’t break the streak! Tracking your streak helps keep you honest, most of us think we’re doing better than we actually are.

Another benefit of a habit tracker is it makes our progress visible. Progress is an extremely powerful motivator especially on bad days.

Habit tracking also helps focus on the process not the result of the habit.Even if habit tracking isn’t for you. Some form of measurement will most likely be helpful.

An important thing to remember is that all streaks end, and when your habit streak ends you need to start the next streak immediately. Never miss twice! The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if you rebound quickly.

It is incredibly valuable to just “show up” even on bad days. Lost days hurt your habits way more than good days help you. If you start with $100 and you gain 50% it only takes a loss of 33% to put you back to the start position. Not showing up hurts much more than having a good day helps.

Not missing a day is so important because it improves your identity. If you never miss a running day, even if it isn’t much you reinforce your identity as a runner. Going to the gym for five minutes a day makes you a gym goer.

The down side of habit tracking is we can become driven by numbers instead of by purpose. We optimise for what we measure, and “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Measures and observations are only useful when it guides a larger purpose.

We tend to measure what is easy to measure and think nothing else is important.

We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and the punishment doesn’t happen for awhile. The best way to break this chain is to speed up the punishment associated with the bad behaviour.

A habit contract is when you verbally or written agreement in which you commit to a particular punishment if you persist with a specific habit.

Genes Matter

The key to maximising your success is to chose a field that compliments your natural abillity.

The people at the top of their fields are not only well-trained but also well-suited to their field. So you will need to explore fields to find something you have some natural ability in.

You will be more likely to stick with a habit if it is something you are reasonably good at.

In theory you can learn to enjoy almost anything, but in practice you are much more likely to enjoy a activity and stick with it if it comes easily to you.

To figure out what you might be predisposed to ask yourself what activities cause you to lose track of time (get you into the flow state).

It requires a lot of effort to get into the top 1% or .1% in a field, but it is much less difficult to get into the top 5%, so one idea is to try to find three or four areas that compliment each other that you can build skills in. You can stand out as someone who has a unique combination of skills rather than fight your way to be the very best in a single skill.

“Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it.”

The Goldilocks Rule

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on a task that is neither too hard nor too easy. Science says it should be at 104% of your current ability… whatever that means. The point is it should be a challenge, but a doable challenge.

If you are in the Goldilocks Zone you increase your chances of getting into the flow state.

The flow state is the experience of being “in the zone” when you lose track of time.

Continuing to do a habit on days when it’s difficult, painful or draining is what separates professionals from amateurs. Professionals stick to a schedule, amateurs let life get in the way.

“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.”

The downside of creating good habits

The downside of a habit is the same as the upside, the task becomes automatic and you become less aware that you are doing it. You become less sensitive to feedback and that hampers improvement.

Habits are necessary but not sufficient for mastery. In order to achieve mastery you need to combine habits with deliberate practice.

Once one habit is mastered you will need to begin building a new habit that improves your skills.

Improvement is not just about learning new skills, it is about reflection and fine tuning.

“A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.”