Atomic habits by James Clear

Copyright © James Clear 2018

A revolutionary way to get 1 per cent better every day.

People think that when you want to change your life, you need to think big. But world-renowned habits expert James Clear has discovered another way. He knows that real change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small decisions: doing two push-ups a day, waking up five minutes early, or holding a single short phone call.

In this ground-breaking book, Clears reveals exactly how these minuscule changes can grow into such life-altering outcomes. He uncovers a handful of simple life hacks (the forgotten art of Habit Stacking, the unexpected power of the Two Minute Rule, or the trick to entering the Goldilocks Zone), and delves into cutting-edge psychology and neuroscience to explain why they matter. Along the way, he tells inspiring stories of Olympic gold medalists, leading CEOs, and distinguished scientists who have used the science of tiny habits to stay productive, motivated, and happy.

These small changes will have a revolutionary effect on your career, your relationships, and your life.

En este libro se pretenden plantear de forma elemental pero rigurosa las cuestiones básicas que interesan al pensamiento político, tanto a nivel teórico como práctico.

Comments extracted from the book, they could be right or wrong, you decide for yourself:

• These improvements were minor, but they gave me a sense of control over my life. I started to feel confident again. And this growing belief in myself rippled into the classroom as I improved my study habits.
• Our lives often depends on the quality of our habits. With same habits, you’ll end up with the same results. But with better habits, anything is possible.
• Readers with a psychology background may recognize some of these terms from operant conditioning, which was first proposed as «stimulus, response, reward» by B. F. Skinner in the 1930s and has been popularized more recently as «cue, routine, reward» in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
• 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.
• If you want to predict where you’ll end up in life, all you have to do is follow the curve of tiny gains or tiny losses, and see how your daily choices will compound ten or twenty years down the line.
• Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
• This is one of the reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes., fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. In order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau, what I call the Plateau of Laten Potential.
• We often expect progress to be linear. At the very least, we hope it will come quickly. In reality, the results of our efforts are often delayed. It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done. This can result in a «valley of disappointment» where people feel discouraged after putting in weeks or months of hard work without experiencing any results. However, this work was not wasted. It was simply stored. It is not until much later that the full value of previous efforts is revealed.
• The see of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger.
• The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.
• Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
• If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
• Are goals completely useless? Of course not. Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.
• Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
• Goals create an «either-or» conflict: either you achieve your goal and are successful or you fail and you are a disappointment. It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. A systems-first mentality provider the antidote. A system can be successful in many different forms, not just the one you first envision.
• When all your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits after accomplishing a goal.
• 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. It is the commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
• Habits are like the atoms of our lives. Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement.
• Habits are a double-edged sword. They can work for you or against you.
• You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
• Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs. There are a set of beliefs and assumptions that shape the system, an identity behind the habits.
• It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior.
• 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.
• True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
• Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity.
• The more deeply a thought or action is tied to your identity, the more difficult is to change it. The biggest barrier to positive change at any level (individual, team, society) is identity conflict.
• Good habits can make rational sense, but if they conflict with your identity, you will fail to put them in action.
• Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
• Your identity emerges out of your habits. You are not born with preset beliefs. Every belief, including those about yourself, is learned and conditioned through experience.
• Your habits are how you embody your identity.
• Your habits are not the only actions that influence your identity, but by virtue of their frequency they are usually the most important ones.
• The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.
• We change bit by bit, day by day, habit by habit. We are continually undergoing microevolutions of the self.
• The most practical way to change who you are is to change what you do.
• Each habit not only gets results but also teaches you something far more important: to trust yourself. You start to believe you can actually accomplish these things.
• I have a friend who lost over 100 pounds by asking herself, «What would a healthy person do?» All day long, she would use this question as a guide. Would a healthy person walk or take a cab? Would a healthy person order a burrito or a salad? She figured if she acted like a healthy person long enough, eventually she would become that person. She was right.
• Your habits shape your identity, and your identity shapes your habits. It’s a two-way street. It’s important to let your values, principles, and identity drive the loop rather than your results. The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome.
• The first step is not what or how, but who. You need to know who you want to be.
• Your identity is not set in stone. You have a choice in every moment. You can choose the identity you want to reinforce today with the habits you choose today.
• Building better habits isn’t about littering your day with life hacks. They are about becoming someone.
• Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
• A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic.
• This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try differently. With practice, the useless movements fade away and the useful actions get reinforced. That’s a habit forming.
• Jason Hreha, behavioral scientist: «Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment».
• 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.
• Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like you’re behind the curve.
• The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.
• The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. It is a bit of information that predicts a reward.
• Cravings are the motivational force behind every habit. Without some level of motivation or desire we have no reason to act.
• What y9u crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers. You do not crave smoking a cigarette, you crave the feeling of relief it provides.
• Cravings differ from person to person. People are not motivated by the same cues.
• The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action.
• Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward.
• How to create a good habit.
  • Cue. Make it obvious.
  • Craving. Make it attractive.
  • Response. Make it easy.
  • Reward. Make if satisfying.
• How to break a bad habit.
  • Cue. Make it invisible.
  • Craving. Make it unattractive.
  • Response. Make it difficult.
  • Reward. Make it unsatisfying.
• Whenever you want to change your behavior, you can simply ask yourself:
  • How can I make it obvious?
  • How can I make it attractive?
  • How can I make it easy?
  • How can I make it satisfying?
• The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible.
• The human brain is a prediction machine. It is continuously taking in your surroundings and analyzing the information it comes across.
• 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. You can notice an opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it.
• As habits form, your actions come under the direction of your automatic and nonconscious mind. You fall into old patterns before you realize what’s happening.
• Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle on our current ones. If a habit remains mindless, you can’t expect to improve it.
• Carl Jung: «Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate».
• When we’ve done something a thousand times before, we being to overlook things. We assume that the next time will be just like the last. Many of our failures to in performance are largely attributable to a lack of self-awareness.
• One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing. This helps explain why the consequences of bad habits can sneak up on us.
• Look at each behavior, and aks yourself, «Is this a good habit, a bad habit, or a neutral habit?».
• There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits. That is, effective at solving problems.
• Generally speaking, good habits will have net positive outcomes. Bad habits have net negative outcomes.
• A question I like to use: «Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be?».
• People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.
• Being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course. We often say yes to little requests because we are not clear enough about what we need to be doing instead.
• You often decide what to do next based on what you have just finished doing.
• 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 behavior on top. This is called habit stacking. You can also insert new behaviors into the middle of your current routines.
• Don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you’re likely to be occupied with something else.
• The most common cues are time and location.
• Items at eye level tend to be purchased more than those down near the floor. For this reason, you’ll find expensive brand names featured in easy-to-reach locations on store shelves, because they drive the most profit.
• Many of the actions we take each day are shaped not by purposeful drive and choice but by the most obvious option.
• Creating obvious visual cues can draw your attention toward a desired habit. If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar stand in the middle of the living room.
• If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have multiple cues.
• You can alter the spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive cues and reduce your exposure to negative ones.
• Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationship to them.
• It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build a new habit in the face of competing cues.
• Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with another. When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits, and the easiest ones will usually win out.
• I know a writer who uses his computer only for writing, his tablet only for reading, and his phone only for social media and texting. Every habit should have a home.
• Focus comes automatically when you are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose. Sleep comes quickly when it is the only thing that happens in your bedroom.
• If you want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an environment that is stable and predictable.
• The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture. Recent research, however, shows something different. «Disciplined» people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
• Perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve those qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
• You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Simply resisting to temptation is an ineffective strategy. It takes too much energy.
• I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.
• One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
• 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 a new dose of willpower to override your desires every time.
• This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
• We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
• When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is release not only when you experience pleasure, but algo when you anticipate it.
• It is the anticipation of a reward, not the fulfillment of it, that get us to take action.
• Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting rewards than for liking them.
• Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
• We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place.
• You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one of your favorite things at the same time.
• Premack’s Principle states that «more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors».
• The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
• Whatever habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive behaviors you’ll find.
• One of the deepest human desires is to belong.
• We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them. We follow the script handed down by our friends and family, our church or school, our local community and society at large.
• Often, you follow the habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and sometimes without remembering.
• We imitate the habits of three groups in particular: the close, the many, the powerful.
• As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits.
• One study found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for natural levels of intelligence. We soak up the qualities and practices of those around us.
• Your culture sets your expectation for what is «normal». Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together.
• Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to a tribe., It transforms a personal quest into a shared one.
• Whenever we are unsure how to act, we look to the group to guide our behavior. We are constantly scanning our environment and wondering, «What is everyone else doing?».
• There is tremendous internal pressure to comply with the norms of the group. The reward of being accepted is often greater than the reward of winning an argument, looking smart, or finding truth. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves.
• Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort.
• Many of our daily habits are imitations of people we admire. We imitate people we envy.
• Every behavior has a surface level craving and a deeper, underlying motive.
• A craving is just a specific manifestation of a deeper underlying motive. At a deep level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relieve anxiety, to win social acceptance and approval, or to achieve status.
• Your habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires. New versions of old vices. The underlying motives behind human behavior remain the same. The specific habits we perform differ based on the period of history.
• Your current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve the problems you face; they are just the methods you learned to use.
• Every action is preceded by a prediction. Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. You are endlessly predicting what will happen in the next moment.
• Our behavior is heavily dependent on how we interpret the events that happen to us, not necessarily the objective reality of the events themselves.
• The same cue can spark a good habit or a bad habit depending on your prediction. The cause of your habits is actually the prediction that precedes them.
• It is only when you predict that you would be better off in a different state that you take action.
• Neurologists have discovered that when emotions and feelings are impaired, we actually lose the ability to make decisions. We have no signal of what to pursue and what to avoid.
• You can make hard habits more attractive if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience. Sometimes, all you need is a slight mind-set shift. Imagine changing just one word: You don’t «have» to. You «get» to.
• Reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive.
• You can reframe «I am nervous» to «I am excited and I’m getting an adrenaline rush to help me concentrate».
• Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.
• Voltaire: «The best is the enemy of the good».
• That’s the biggest reason why you slip into motion rather than taking action: you want to delay failure.
• It’s easy to be in motion and convince yourself that you’re still making progress.
• Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. 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.
• If you want to master a habit, the key is to start with repetition, not perfection. You don’t need to map out every feature of a new habit. You just need to practice it. You just need to get your reps in.
• Habit formation is the process by which a behavior becomes progressively more automatic through repetition. The more you repeat an activity, the more the structure of your brain changes to become efficient at that activity.
• Particular regions of the brain adapt as they are used and atrophy as they are abandoned.
• Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. This means that simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit.
• Habits form based on frequency, not time. One of the most common questions I hear is, «How long does it take to build a new habit?» But what people really should be asking is, «How many does it take to form a new habit?» That is, how many repetitions are required to make a habit automatic? What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior. It’s the frequency that makes the difference.
• It doesn’t really matter how long it takes for a habit to become automatic. What matters is that you take the actions you need to take to make progress.
• The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning. Focus on taking action, not being in motion.
• 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.
• It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort. We are motivated to do what is easy.
• You are capable of doing very hard things. The problem is that some days you feel like doing the hard work and some days you feel like giving in. On the tough days, it’s crucial to have as many things working in your favor as possible so that you can overcome the challenges life naturally throws at you. The idea behind make it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible in the moment to do things that payoff in the long run.
• Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life.
• Much of the battle of building better habits comes down to finding ways to reduce the friction associated with our good habits and increase the friction associated with our bad ones.
• Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make the next action easy.
• We should ask ourselves the same question: «How can we design a world where it’s easy to do what’s right?».
• Researchers estimate that 40 to 50 percent of our actions on any given day are done out of habit. The true influence of your habits is even greater than these numbers suggest.
• A habit can be completed in just a few seconds, but it can also shape the actions that you take for minutes or hours afterward.
• The habits you follow without thinking often determine the choices you make when you are thinking.
• If I change clothes, I know the workout will happen. Everything that follows (driving to the gym, deciding which exercises to do, stepping under the bar) is easy once I’ve taken the first step.
• The difference between a good day and a bad day is often a few productive and healthy choices made at decisive moments. Each one is like a fork in the road, and these choices stack up throughout the day and can ultimately lead to very different outcomes.
• The Two-Minute Rule states, «When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do». The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. A new habit should not feel like a challenge.
• Any habit can be scaled down into a two-minute version:
  • «Read before bed each night» becomes «Read one page».
  • «Do thirty minutes of yoga» becomes «Take out my yoga mat».
  • «Study for class» becomes «Open my notes».
• Once you’ve started doing the right thing, it is much easier to continue doing it.
• The point is not do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up. The truth is, a habit must be established before it can be improved. Instead of trying to engineer a perfect habit from the start, do the easy thing on a more consistent basis. You have to standardize before you can optimize.
• The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things. By doing the same warm-up before every workout, you make it easier to get into a state of peak performance. You may not be able to automate the whole process, but you can make the first action mindless. Make it easy to start and the rest will follow.
• The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. Ernest Hemingway: «The best way is to always stop when you are going good».
• We rarely think about change this way because everyone is consumed by the end goal. But one push-up is better than not exercising. It’s better to do less than you hoped than to do nothing at all.
• Eventually, you’ll end up with the habit you had originally hoped to build while still keeping your focus where it should be: on the first two minutes of the behavior.
• Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.
• A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that controls your actions in the future.
• What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
• Once you understand how the brain prioritizes rewards, the answers become clear: the consequences of bad habits are delayed while the rewards are immediate. With good habits, it is the reverse: the immediate outcome is unenjoyable, but the ultimate outcome feels good.
• The brain’s tendency to prioritize the present moment means you can’t rely on good intentions.
• As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals.
• Because of how we are wired, most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfaction.
• At some point, success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward.
• It’s possible to train yourself to delay gratification, but you need to work with the grain of human nature, not against it. The best way to do this is to add a little bit of immediate pleasure to t he habits that pay off in the long-run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.
• The vital thing in getting a habit to stick is to feel successful, even if it’s in a small way.
• In a perfect world, the reward for a good habit is the habit itself. In the real world, good habits tend to feel worthwhile only after they have provided you with something. Early on, it’s all sacrifice.
• Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
• Making progress is satisfying, and visual measure provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behavior and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction.
• Research has shown that people who track their progress are all more likely to improve than those who don’t.
• Habit tracking also keeps you honest. Most of us have a distorted view of our own behavior. We think we act better than we do. When the evidence is right in front of you, you’re less likely to lie to yourself.
• The most effective form of motivation is progress.
• Tracking can become its own form of reward.
• Habit tracking also helps keep your eye on the ball: you’re focused on the process rather than the result.
• Manual tracking should be limited to your most important habits. It is better to consistently track one habit that to sporadically track ten.
• No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice. I can’t be perfect, but I can avoid a second lapse. 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. The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast.
• Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all. You don’t realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad (or busy) days. Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you.
• Charlie Munger: «The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily».
• This is why the «bad» workouts are often the most important ones. Sluggish days and bad workouts maintain the compound gains you accrued from previous good days. Simply doing something is huge. Don’t put up a zero. Don’t let losses eat into your compounding.
• It’s about the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. It’s easy to train when you feel good, but it’s crucial to show up when you don’t feel like it, even if you do less than you hope. Going to the gym for five minutes may not improve your performance, but it reaffirms your identity.
• Goodhart’s Law, Charles Goodhart: «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.
• Knowing that someone is watching can be a powerful motivator. You are less likely to procrastinate or give up because there is an immediate cost.
• Habits are easier to perform, and more satisfying to stick with, when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities. People are born with different abilities. Some people don’t like to discuss this fact. On the surface, your genes seem to be fixed, and it’s no fun to talk about things you cannot control.
• The key is to direct your effort toward areas that both excite you and match your natural skills, to align your ambitions with your ability.
• Your personality is the set of characteristics that is consistent from situation to situation. The most proven scientific analysis of personality traits is known as the «Big Five», which breaks them down into five spectrums of behavior.
  1. Openness to experience: from curious and inventive one one end to cautious and consistent on the other.
  2. Conscientiousness: organized and efficient to easygoing and spontaneous.
  3. Extroversion: outgoing and energetic to solitary and reserved.
  4. Agreeableness: friendly and compassionate to challenging and detached.
  5. Neuroticism: anxious and sensitive to confident, calm, and stable.
• In theory, you can enjoy almost anything. In practice, you are more likely to enjoy the things that come easily to you.
• Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.
• In the beginning of a new activity, there should be a period of exploration. The goal is to try out many possibilities, research a broad range of ideas, and cast a wide net. After this initial period of exploration, shift your focus to the best solution you’ve found, but keep experimenting occasionally. If you are currently winning, you exploit, exploit, exploit. If you are currently losing, you continue to explore, explore, explore. In the long run it is probably most effective to work on the strategy that seems to deliver the best results about 80 to 90 percent of the time and keep exploring with the remaining 10 to 20 percent.
• 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? What feels natural to me? When have I felt alive? When have I felt like the real me?
• The mark of whether you are made for a task is not whether you love it but whether you can handle the pain of the task easier than most people.
• Our genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on. We know which types of opportunities to look for and which types of challenges to avoid. The better we understand our nature, the better our strategy can be.
• People get caught up in the fact that they have limits that they rarely exert the effort required to get close to them.
• Steve Martin faced this fear every week for eighteen years. In his words, «10 years learning, 4 years spent refining, and 4 years as a wild success».
• While there is still much to learn, one of the most consistent findings is that the way to maintain motivation and achieve peak levels of desire is to work on tasks of «just manageable difficulty». The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.
• 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.
• Once a habit has been established, it’s important to continue to advance in small ways. These little improvements and new challenges keep you engaged.
• Without variety, we get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.
• Many of us get depressed when we lose focus or motivation because we think that successful people have some bottomless reserve of passion. This coach was saying that really successful people feel the same lack of motivation as everyone else. The difference is that they still find a way to show up despite the feelings of boredom.
• Mastery require practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes.
• The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. As our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
• Machiavelli: «Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly».
• Stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur. Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work toward it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.
• When a habit is important to you, you have to be willing to stick to it in any mood.
• 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.
• Habits are the backbone of any pursuit of excellence.
• As a habit becomes automatic, you become less sensitive to feedback. You fall into mindless repetition. It becomes easier to let mistakes slide. When you can do it «good enough» on autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better. You get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors. You assume you’re getting better because you’re gaining experience. In reality, you are merely reinforcing your current habits, not improving them. Some research has shown that once a skill has been mastered there is usually a slight decline in performance over time.
• Habits are necessary, but not sufficient for mastery. What you need is a combination of automatic habits and deliberate practice.
• It is precisely at the moment when you begin to feel like you have mastered a skill, that you must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency.
• Pat Riley: «Sustaining an effort is the most important thing for any enterprise. The way to be successful is to learn how to do things right, then do them the same way every time».
• Reflection and review enables the long-term improvement of all habits because it makes you aware of your mistakes and helps you consider possible paths for improvement.
• Improvement is not just about learning habits, it’s also about fine-tuning them.
• The more sacred an idea is to us, the more strongly we will defend it against criticism.
• The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you.
• When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.
• Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.
• A lack of self-awareness is poison. Reflection and review is the antidote.
• The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them. It’s a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.
• Each of the people, teams, and companies we have covered has faced different circumstances, but ultimately progressed in the same way: through a commitment to tiny, sustainable, unrelenting improvements.
• Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.
• The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements. It’s remarkable what you can build if you just don’t stop.
• Small habits don’t add up. They compound. That’s the power of atomic habits. Tiny changes. Remarkable results.
• Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure, but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
• Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems.
• Craving is about wanting to fix everything. Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything.
• Friedrich Nietzsche: «He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how». If your motivation and desire are great enough, you’ll take action even when it is quite difficult.
• 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.
• Emotions drive behavior. Every decision is an emotional decision at some level.
• People with damage to emotional centers of the brain can list many reasons for taking action but still will not act because they do not have emotions to drive them.
• We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional. The primary mode of the brain os to feel; the secondary mode is to think.
• Your response tends to follow your emotions. Our thoughts and actions are rooted in what we find attractive, not necessarily in what is logical. This is one reason why appealing to emotion is typically more powerful than appealing to reason. If a topic makes someone feel emotional, they will rarely be interested in the data. This is why emotions can be such a threat to wise decision making.
• With craving, we are dissastified but driven. Without craving, we are satisfied but lack ambition.
• If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.
• Self-control is difficult because it is not satisfying. Inhibiting our desires does not usually resolve them.
• Our expectations determine our satisfaction. An average experience preceded by high expectations is a disappointment. An average experience preceded by low expectations is a delight. When liking and wanting are approximately the same, you feel satisfied.
• Seneca: «Being poor is not having too little, it is wanting more». If your wants outpaces your likes, you’ll always be unsatisfied.
• Desire initiates. Pleasure sustains. Feeling motivated gets you to act. Feeling successful gets you to repeat.
• New strategies seem more appealing than old ones because they can have unbounded hope.

Some related links:

• Official site.
• Atomic Habits Cheat Sheet.
• Bonus Chapter: How to apply these ideas to business.
• Bonus Chapter: How to apply these ideas to parenting.
• Blogs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10.
• Goodreads.
• QuickRead.

Some related books:

• The power of habit by Charles Duhigg.
• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams.
• The willpower instinct by Kelly McGonigal, Ph. D..
• Taking Responsibility by Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D..
• Ordena tu mente para ordenar tu vida de María Ibáñez y Jesús Jiménez.

raul