📖 Summaries & Notes - Atomic Habits
THE FUNDAMENTALS: WHY TINY CHANGES MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE
Chapter 1: The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
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Small changes often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold. The most powerful outcomes of any compounding process are delayed. You need to be patient.
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If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead.
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You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
| Positive Compounding | Negative Compunding |
|---|---|
| Productivity compounds - automate an old task or master a new skill. | Stress compounds - can result in serious health issues. |
| Knowledge compounds - new knowledge opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas. | Negative thoughts compounds - negative thoughts tend to make you interpret life that way. |
| Relationship compounds - helping others is helping yourself. | Outrage compounds - microaggressions build up to riots. |
Notes:
For so many times I focused only on short-term achievements, and I’ve been admiring people who master Linear Algebra in a week or lose 10 lbs in a week. The pursuit of quick success blinded me for so long that I’d easily lose faith about myself each time it did not work in a short period of time.
Life is short indeed, but there’s no need to rush. You don’t wanna define your life using just a handful of big achievements. Do they truly make you happy? Or do they play a bigger role in making you look successful? Reflecting on my life, I would definitely echo what the writer says in this chapter: it is the way to achieving goals that make you feel great; achieving goals itself does not bring as much joy as you thought it would.
Chapter 2: How your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa)
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Changing our habits is challenging for 2 reasons: we try to change the wrong thing, and we try to change our habits the wrong way.
- There are 3 levels at which change can occur:
- outcomes (what you get): goals are set at this level, e.g. losing weight, publishing a book;
- process (what you do): habits and systems, e.g. implementing a new routine at the gym, developing a meditation practice;
- identity (what you believe): beliefs, e.g. worldview, self-image, judgments about yourself and others.
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There are a set of beliefs and assumptions that shape the system, an identity behind the habits. Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last.
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The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associatd with it. True behavior change is identity change. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
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Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to constantly edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity. And habits are the path to changing your identity.
- New identities require new evidence, and it is a simple 2-step process:
- decide the type of person you want to be;
- prove it to yourself with small wins.
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The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not a particular outcome.
- Fundamentally, habits are not about having something. They are about becoming someone. Habits are the channel through which you develop your deepest beliefs about yourself.
Chapter 3: How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps
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A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic, and the process of habit formation begins with trial and error.
- The process of building a habit can be divided into four simple steps: cue, craving, response, and reward.
- Cue: triggers your brain to initiate a behavior - it is a bit of information that predicts a reward;
- Craving: the motivational force behind every behavior - it is linked to a desire to change your internal state;
- Response: the actual habit you perform - whether it occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behavior;
- Reward: serve 2 purposes - they satisfy us and teach us.
- Using the Four Laws of Behavior Change, we can create a good habit by:
- make it obvious (cue);
- make it attractive (craving);
- make it easy (response);
- make it satisfying (reward);
- And we can break a bad habit by:
- make it invisible (cue);
- make it unattractive (craving);
- make it difficult (response);
- make it unsatisfying (reward).
THE 1ST LAW: MAKE IT OBVIOUS
Chapter 4: The Man Who Didn’t Look Right
- One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining awareness of what we are actually doing. A simple exercise you can use to become more aware of your behavior is to use a Habits Scorecard. To create your own:
- make a list of you daily habits;
- look at each behavior, if it is a good habit, write ‘+’ next to it; if it is a bad habit, write ‘-‘ next to it; if it is a neutral habit, write ‘=’.
- The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for them. If you feel like you need extra help, then you can try Pointing-and-Calling in your own life. Say out loud the action that you are thinking of taking and what the outcome will be. Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences seem more real.